The talk will start by recollecting how we started up with an open, interoperable Internet that allowed everyone to cooperate and deploy new content and services, and ended up with a concentration of money and power of unseen scale in the history of mankind. Technical and market developments are centralizing the Internet more and more into the hands of a few companies, very concentrated in terms of geography, jurisdiction, ownership and views of the world. We will discuss how the EU plans to counter these trends, what the various regulations and projects are, and how they would work.

We will then focus on how open source in Europe could be impacted by the new rules. Some of the provisions are particularly in line with an open, distributed Internet architecture, mandating the adoption of open standards and interoperability and preventing dominant players from advantaging their own applications and services over independent ones. Social media, instant messaging and mobile apps are three sectors that could be particularly affected.

In the end, the talk aims to create awareness in the European open source community around the changing regulatory scenario, so that we are ready for it.