Proud Poland: A Pro Digital Power Haunted by Nationalist Nightmares
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Loading... - Cade Atkinson
- 13 Jul 2022
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Often at odds with Brussels, Poland is uncomfortable with the European Union’s (EU’s) regulatory push to clamp down on the digital economy.
Poland is pro-digital, supporting the digitization of public services and innovative companies. It favors light-touch regulation to big digital platforms, placing it among the minority free-market minnows such as Estonia.
At the same time, Poland’s Law and Justice government, in power since 2015, takes a traditional position on religious and social issues.1 The government’s stance on cultural issues is divisive within Polish society and often puts Warsaw at odds with Brussels on content moderation, artificial intelligence (AI), and other key digital dossiers.
DIGITAL PERFORMANCE
In Poland, 90% of households enjoyed Internet access in 2020 (for broadband Internet, the figure was 67.7%), with fixed-line Internet costing an average of $16 per month.2 Coverage is uneven: 4.5 million Poles have never used the Internet, according to a report by Federacji Konsumentów, Poland’s Consumer Federation.3 The country has taken steps to counter digital exclusion. The National Broadband Plan — adopted in 2014 and updated in 2020 — envisages that every household in Poland will have access to the Internet with a speed of at least 100 megabytes per second (MB/s) by 2025.4
Large US companies run Poland’s most-visited websites.8 In recent years, a growing percentage of Poles have begun to shop online, a trend supported by the pandemic.9 The European Commission’s Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) shows that the average Pole buys more online than the average German. Today, the e-commerce market in Poland is worth an estimated PLN 100 billion ($25 billion), up from PLN 70 billion before the pandemic and PLN 27 billion in 2016.10
Investment in Polish venture capital is growing, too. In 2020, it amounted to €477 million ($540 million), an increase of 70% compared to the previous year.11 Public-private capital accounted for 62% of financing, while 48% of the total value of transactions came from international funds.
Cybersecurity represents a major concern, not only in relation to attacks attributed to Russia, but also to the perceived threat from China.12 Warsaw has urged NATO allies to coordinate against Chinese cybersecurity challenges.13 In its Cybersecurity Strategy for 2019-2024, the government seeks to bolster the country’s resistance to cyberthreats while “guaranteeing the right to privacy and maintaining a free and open Internet.”14
This tension between digital threat and digital opportunity lies at the heart of Poland’s digital policy and how it plays out in the country’s relations with the EU.
VIEWS ON EU DIGITAL POLICY
Warsaw views digital as an opportunity for the Polish economy and is skeptical about imposing restrictions on online marketplaces and social media. But Poland punches below its potential weight in pursuing free-market, pro-US policies. Its attacks on EU democratic norms undercut its leverage.
Warsaw’s pro-digital attitude is perhaps most visible in the government’s approach to supporting artificial intelligence (AI), and its skepticism about potential EU-imposed restrictions. The country’s 2020 AI policy paper emphasizes the economic benefits of introducing AI in priority sectors of the Polish economy, which the paper estimates at around 2.65% of the gross domestic product (GDP). The paper assigns the need for greater Polish involvement in the development of the moral dimensions of AI.15 “It is also crucial that the AI solutions created always serve people, putting their dignity and rights first. That is why it is so important that the Polish voice continues to be heard in the global debate on the ethics of artificial intelligence and how intelligent or autonomous agents operate,” the paper states. Read More…
