This document is offered as an expert contribution to ongoing discussions about the data aspects of the Digital Omnibus. Drawn from my experience in digital policy, technology strategy, and digital business, I find that the Commission's current Omnibus proposal contains a small number of provisions that achieve genuine simplification and strengthen the reliability of the regulatory environment, alongside a larger number of provisions that, however well-intentioned, would produce outcomes contrary to the legislative aims set out in the Commission's own framing. My purpose is to provide the framework and background information necessary for trilogue interlocutors to identify which provisions can be retained, which can be improved, and which should be reconsidered, so that the final Omnibus achieves the impact that its proponents seek.

The authoritarians are winning, we can all see that. It wouldn't be the worst thing if the pro-democracy camp stopped being naive about social media.

Rum babas have a reputation for being hard to bake, and indeed if you look around you can find some really intricate recipes. But, having tried a few, frankly, I've never found the extra complexity to be worth it. At the end of the day, it's a sponge cake with run syrup, whipped cream, and rum. Don't overthink it — especially after the rum.

I have often found myself confounded by the behaviour of some people who seem impervious to reality — like the people still on X today. Here, I try to understand what grounds their epistemology and its consequences, and what that means for the rest of us. Being committed to a better future is where genuine seriousness is, and that seriousness can only be approached in a spirit of embodied, determined, relentless hope.

Talking in terms of horizontal or vertical interoperability is too constrictive a mental model to understand what interoperability does. Doing better matters, and it's right within reach.

We are facing a coordinated international fascist movement that works with explicit backing from Moscow, Washington, and tech monopolies, and is propagating itself through its own media apparatus. Yet people who claim to side with democracy keep doing work to support Fascintern media because they misunderstand how it works. This needs to change.

Digital sovereignty has a bad reputation. In internet governance circles, sovereignty is considered awkward enough to be referred to by as the "s-word." It is often associated with misguided attempts at returning to the era of national champions, like building a French search engine or a European Google, or worse with the eternal boogeyman that is the "splinternet." It doesn't have to be this way!

The explosion of digital infrastructure systems over the past thirty years may be the biggest but least recognised shock delivered by the internet. We need to develop the governance capacity to manage it and force it out of hands of the democracy-hostile corporations that control it today.

People mean well but ethics is hard. In tech, we have a knack for applying ethics in the most useless ways possible — even when we earnestly want to improve humankind's lot. Why does this matter, why are we failing, and how can we fix it?

What if the internet were public interest technology? Is that too wildly speculative? I think not. I am not talking about a utopian project here — a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free. But while there is a lot of solid thinking about various digital issues or pieces of internet infrastructure (much of which I rely upon here), I have yet to read to an answer to this question: What global digital architecture should we assemble if we take seriously the idea that the internet should be public interest technology?