Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs, part of European Commission's Horizon program, fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NLnet's calls). This year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programs for 2025, we notice that Next Generation Internet is not mentioned any more as part of Cluster 4.
NGI programs have shown their strength and importance to support the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. For more details, see the NGI Impact Report.
We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and ecomomical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from Europe, and mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations.
Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 millions euros to:
- Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe;
- A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life;
- A structured eco-system of talented contributors driving the creation of new internet commons and the evolution of existing internet commons.
In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years (for example us, Spare Cores as well via the NGI Search initiative), backed by 18 organisations managing these European funding consortia.
NGI contributes to a vast ecosystem, as most of its budget is allocated to fund third parties by the means of open calls, to structure commons that cover the whole Internet scope - from hardware to application, operating systems, digital identities or data traffic supervision. This third-party funding is not renewed in the current program, leaving many projects short on resources for research and innovation in Europe.
Moreover, NGI allows exchanges and collaborations across all the Euro zone countries as well as "widening countries"¹, currently both a success and and an ongoing progress, likewise the Erasmus programme before us. NGI also contributes to opening and supporting longer relationships than strict project funding does. It encourages to implement projects funded as pilots, backing collaboration, identification and reuse of common elements across projects, interoperability in identification systems and beyond, and setting up development models that mix diverse scales and types of European funding schemes.
NGI supports free and open source software since 2020, which lets us keep our data local and favors a community-wide economy and know-how, while allowing an international collaboration.