Displaying items by tag: digital services

Donald Trump is intensifying pressure on the EU and other nations over digital regulations and taxes which he argues unfairly target American technology companies. Threatening new tariffs and restrictions on exports, he has warned that countries with policies he deems discriminatory will face consequences unless they roll back their measures. At the heart of the dispute are the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, designed to curb monopolistic practices and require platforms to tackle harmful content, but viewed by Washington as an attack on US firms like Google and Meta. The standoff raises tensions at a delicate stage in transatlantic trade talks, with many issues unresolved despite a preliminary agreement. Analysts caution that Europe is unlikely to reverse rules which represent long-sought goals of digital sovereignty, while Trump’s negotiating tactic is seen as ‘keep on pushing, keep on demanding: nothing is ever fully agreed upon.’

On the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Deputy Minister Oleksandr Bornyakov was caught in a firefight in Kyiv. Despite the chaos of war, Bornyakov and his team pressed forward with Ukraine’s ambitious digital transformation project: the Diia app. Launched in 2019, Diia enables citizens to access over forty government services and thirty personal documents - from tax payments to voting in Eurovision - directly from their mobile phones. A web portal adds access to 130 services. Now serving over 22 million users, Diia is considered one of the world’s most advanced digital government services. Its success stems from Ukraine’s large, affordable tech workforce and the foundational development of a centralised data exchange. The urgency of war accelerated innovation, enabling the swift rollout of wartime tools like damage compensation and troop reporting. Looking ahead, Ukraine plans to incorporate AI to make services even more seamless, but experts advise caution about this.