Europe

As dry and bureaucratic as EU legislation may seem, it can also be groundbreaking and, dare we say it, radical. The bloc has taken a global lead in tackling regulation in areas such as green taxonomy and the much-anticipated AI Act. European lawmakers are also at the forefront in trying to curb the seemingly ever-growing dominance of Big Tech. 

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is the EU’s tool to attempt to open the digital app marketplace up for smaller competitors. It sets criteria to identify the “gatekeepers” of the market and make them comply with a certain list of do’s and don’ts. 

Among other things, the DMA will promote interoperability, forcing companies like Google, Apple, and Meta to let users link rival apps to their services. This means that Apple will need to release the tightly controlled (and heavily commissioned) grip it exerts through its app store.

In the words of Cédric O, France’s then-digital economy minister, upon the signing of the act last year, “Don’t break them up, break them open.” 

Theoretically, it also means that users of different messaging apps will be able to contact each other from, say, WhatsApp to Telegram, but it is unclear how this would actually be implemented. It will also forbid the gatekeeper companies from doing things such as track their users outside core platforms for targeted marketing without consent. 

While it entered into force on 1 November 2022, the DMA technically began applying yesterday, 2 May 2023. This means that potential gatekeeper tech companies now have until 3 July to notify their core platform services to the European Commission. 

The Commission will then have 45 working days (until 6 September) to decide whether or not they pass the gatekeeper threshold. If the Commission concludes that the company in question does indeed meet the designated criteria, the gatekeeper will then have six months (until 6 March 2024) to comply with the requirements set out in the DMA. 

In the case of non-compliance, the Commission can impose fines of up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide annual turnover. In the event of repeated infringements this can increase to 20% plus periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of the company’s total worldwide daily turnover.

Europe ‘strengthening digital sovereignty’

So who are the “gatekeepers?” According to the DMA, they are platforms in the digital markets that “have a significant impact on the internal market, serve as an important gateway for business users to reach their end users, and which enjoy, or will foreseeably enjoy, an entrenched and durable position.”

As with all legal texts, the criteria go into significant detail. Simplified, they entail that companies will be considered gatekeepers if they have a market capitalisation of more than €75 billion, and 45 million monthly active users in the EU.

There are 10 platform services listed in the DMA. These are: 

• Online intermediation services;
• Online search engines;
• Online social networking services;
• Video-sharing platform services;
• Number-independent interpersonal communication services;
• Operating systems;
• Cloud computing services;
• Advertising services;
• Web browsers;
• Virtual assistants.

A company may be listed as a gatekeeper for more than one service. 

Together with the Digital Services Act (DSA), the DMA forms one of the central columns of the EU’s digital strategies. They are both part of a regulatory program known as A Europe Fit For the Digital Age.

Adopted three years ago, it is part of the Commission’s ambition to make this Europe‘s ‘Digital Decade’ in which it will “strengthen its digital sovereignty and set standards, rather than following those of others – with a clear focus on data, technology, and infrastructure.”

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At the beginning of the year, news readers were treated to images of German police forcefully removing climate activists from the village of Lützerath to make way for an open-air coal mine. Indeed, Germany may have averted a looming energy crisis this past winter by upping its coal consumption.

While prioritising energy independence may have caused a detour from the transition to renewables, the country’s goal is to reach climate neutrality by 2045: five years ahead of the EU target. A small step on the way but a step nonetheless is Europe’s first solar panel roof-covered cycling path which opened this week in the city of Freiburg, about a two-hour drive south of Stuttgart.  

The photovoltaic (PV) pilot project consists of a 300-metre-long installation featuring over 900 translucent glass solar panels, and will generate around 280 MWh of solar power per year. Solarwatt, the producer of the panels covering the path, says they are particularly durable as the solar cells are enclosed on the front and back by robust glass panes. 

Existing infrastructure has increasing role to play

The cleantech company now has three decades of experience creating solar panels and currently employs over 800 people across Europe. In 2022, it acquired Utrecht-based battery-storage specialist REConvert for an undisclosed amount, establishing a Dutch subsidiary. 

Solarwatt’s CEO Detlef Neuhaus believes rethinking photovoltaics will be essential for Germany’s transition to clean energy, and sees an untapped potential in already existing infrastructure. 

“Already sealed areas such as parking lots, paths and roads are playing an increasingly important role,” Neuhaus said. “We are proud that we could contribute our part to the success of this innovative pilot project.”

The modules used in the bike lane project have general technical approval from the German Institute for Building Technology (DIBt). This means that they can be used without any restriction for both private and public projects, without the need for case-by-case testing. 

Solar-powered neighbour stadium

Meanwhile, the pilot bicycle lane is situated close to the SC Freiburg football stadium. The arena is already equipped with a 2.4MW solar panel roof, courtesy of around 6,000 heterojunction solar modules from Swiss manufacturer Meyer Burger.

This makes it the third-largest solar panel installation on any stadium in the world. (The largest belongs to Turkish Süper Lig football club Galatasaray’s home arena Nef Stadium, which comprises more than 10,000 panels.) 

The potential for much longer PV-roofed paths

This may be Europe’s first solar panel roof-covered bicycle path (excluding several projects where the path itself has been covered with PV panels). However, since 2014, South Korea boasts a 9 kmbicycle lane covered by a roof made of solar panels. 

This 4-metre wide lane runs in the middle of an eight-lane highway, and connects the cities of Daejeon and Sejong. Its 7,502 solar panels are capable of producing 2,200MWh per year – the equivalent of powering around 600 households, according to the country’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. Several other Korean cities have implemented the technology, but this remains the longest and most power-generating project to date.

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Wherever you fall on the quantum sceptic spectrum, you cannot deny that the potential of the technology is fascinating. Don’t worry, we will admit to not understanding it fully yet either, but the founders of QuiX Quantum do. 

Together with scientists from the Leibniz University Hannover, the team has demonstrated a fully-integrated quantum light source on a chip smaller than the size of a one-euro coin. 

The study, called “Fully on-chip photonic turnkey quantum source for entangled qubit/qudit state generation,” just FYI, was published in Nature Photonics this week. Its results could reportedly prove a game-changer for technologies such as quantum computing. 

Photonics offer temperature advantages

Quantum photonics is a field of research that explores the behaviour of light and its interactions with matter at the quantum level. Quantum light sources produce photons that can be used as quantum bits, or qubits. One of the main advantages of photonics compared to superconductor approaches is that it is compatible with room temperature operating conditions. 

However, most sources are external laser systems, making them bulky and non-reproducible and thus unsuitable for out-of-lab use or production at larger scale. Integrated, or on-chip sources are becoming popular due to being more compact and stable.

A fully-integrated light source, such as the one demonstrated by QuiX and Leibniz University scientists, will allow all stages of the Quantum Information Processing (QIP) to be on a single chip, which will lead to greater stability and scalability of the technology.

Plug-and-play photonics solutions

QuiX Quantum was founded in January 2019. Since then, the company has raised over €5.5 million in funding and already become the European market leader for quantum computing hardware based on photonics. They sold their first quantum processors in 2021, and are building 8- and 64-qubit Universal Quantum Computers worth €14 million for the German Aerospace Center. 

The company says its goal is “the continued disruption of quantum computing with our high-tech, scalable, future-proof, plug-and-play integrated photonic solutions.” Its recent breakthrough could not come at a better time. The EU has just launched a €19 million project to help quantum startups transition from lab to market. 

Earlier this year, QuiX Quantum took home the prestigious Prism Award for its 20-mode Quantum Photonic Processor. This award is known as the “Oscars of Photonics,” presented during the Photonics West conference in San Francisco.

“In four years, we went from an idea to delivering award-winning, market-leading hardware for photonic quantum computing,” Stefan Hengesbach, CEO of Quix, stated. “This awarded processor is the core element of our current generation quantum computers, which has already created a huge impact in the quantum ecosystem as an excellent tool to perform fundamental quantum mechanical experiments on-chip.

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