Digitalminister: Wildberger versucht sich in digitaler Industriepolitik

Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger wants SAP and Telekom to develop a citizen app, and for a German-Canadian AI champion to emerge. Can this work?

Digital sovereignty has been a well-intentioned but rarely concretized guiding principle in political debate for years. Karsten Wildberger, Germany's first Digital Minister, now seems serious about pursuing it. Two major projects underscore the former manager's ambition to genuinely engage in a form of digital industrial policy.

Firstly, there's the plan for a "super app" for citizens. It aims to provide a long-awaited central access point to administrative services, from applications for basic security to resident registration and business formation. The federal government, states, and various institutions have struggled for years to digitize the underlying processes and access points; the application, likely to be called the "Deutschland-App," is intended to become the focal point. For the implementation of a prototype, Wildberger's ministry has commissioned SAP and Telekom, with the Heilbronn-based Schwarz Group also expected to supply technology from its Wire Messenger. The minister clearly intends to leverage the app project to strengthen the domestic IT industry.

The fact that SAP and Telekom, who delivered no masterpiece with the Corona warning app years ago, are being commissioned is causing discontent in the digital industry. Critics argue that startups could have been commissioned or that an open-source approach could have been adopted. However, the former Ceconomy manager is likely more familiar with the world of SAP and Schwarz Digits. The risk is that Wildberger may be burdening himself (and ultimately us citizens) with a new mega IT project that threatens to become "expensive, centralistic, and cumbersome," as digital expert Holger Schmidt puts it.

Democratic Front Against Big Tech

Wildberger's other industrial policy initiative is the attempt to merge the former German AI hope, Aleph Alpha, with the Canadian company Cohere. Handelsblatt first reported on the planned merger on Thursday, though the involved companies have remained remarkably tight-lipped so far. A German-Canadian merger could form a kind of liberal-democratic front against the dominance of American Big Tech companies; this is the obvious political will behind the fusion. However, this can only succeed if it also makes business sense. And here, too, there are doubts.

Both Aleph Alpha and Cohere have long lost their leading edge in AI. Whether and how the competencies or resources of the two companies would complement each other is not immediately obvious. It would certainly not be a merger of equals: Aleph Alpha was most recently valued at less than half a billion euros, while Cohere was valued at almost 6 billion euros last summer. This gives the impression that Aleph Alpha shareholders might use the politically desired undertaking to somehow achieve a passable exit. The Schwarz Group is among the shareholders, and interestingly, SAP also holds stakes in both AI companies.

The framework conditions for a deal are reportedly also to include generous government and downstream agency contracts for the merged company. This is well-intentioned but, at this point and without knowledge of the required services and products, competitors, and their costs, would be far from sensible.

Ultimately, as the citizen app example shows, the crux of digital sovereignty lies in the fact that relying solely on domestic providers simply because they are not part of Big Tech is not enough. Quality must also be present.