Europe has now leapfrogged the United States to become the world’s most wired region, according to the European Commission’s latest tally of broadband usage. It showed that the number of European broadband users has reached the 100 million mark, about 20 per cent higher than in the United States and Canada combined.

That’s impressive no matter how you crunch the figures. Plus, when you consider that broadband speeds are, on average, double, triple and even four times higher here in many European countries (I’m speaking of Finland, Sweden and France, which tout average broadband speeds of more than 20 megabits per second) than they are in North America, you begin to see why Brussels has such high hopes for Europe’s tech industry.

Here are the highlights from the European Commission’s i2010 report, a scorecard for the EU’s strategy to make the region more competitive and create high-tech jobs:

- Nearly 80 per cent of all European internet users are hooked up to a high-speed broadband connection.

- The number of regular internet users in the 27 EU countries has surpassed the 50 per cent mark, after 40 million newbies went online in the last year.

- Nearly 40 per cent of internet users are shopping online.

- 77 per cent of all businesses in the EU have net access.

- e-government initiatives are up promisingly with more than 40 per cent of government forms now being filled in online.

- 14 of the 27 member states have surpassed the 50 per cent mark for online penetration (as a percentage of total population). They include The Netherlands at the top end with roughly 82 per cent, the United Kingdom, in the middle, at about 65 per cent and Ireland, on the lower end, matching the EU average of 52 per cent.

But the accomplishments mask yet again the vexing problem of the digital divide: 40 million EU citizens are still not online, and in Italy, from where I write, just one third of the population regularly uses the internet. In Greece, just one quarter of the population is in that category, and in Romania it’s even worse, at about one fifth. In this respect, the emergent divide can be best characterised as a north-south and west-east phenomenon that is showing little signs of improving.

There is also a lag in e-government take-up, but this time it’s not merely geographically isolated. Rather, it appears that a determined elected official can succeed in automating much of the day-to-day bureaucracy we have to deal with in a few short years. For example, Portugal and Malta, along with Austria and the Czech Republic, now allow citizens to conduct all basic public services online. The UK stands at an impressive 90 per cent of basic government services now online, but in countries like Bulgaria, Poland and Slovakia, you still have to queue up to pay your parking fines and renew your driving licences – hardly a model of EU efficiency.

The most worrying aspect of the report is still the anaemic growth in spending on research and development, the benchmark for determining EU competitiveness over the next five to ten years. In this crucial category, the region is falling short. In 2005, when the European Commission set out the ground rules for the i2010 initiative, it staked out an R&D investment goal of 3 per cent of GDP by 2010. This will not be achieved, the EU said this week.

American businesses spend just over 10 per cent of their R&D budget on technology, compared to an EU average of about 6 per cent. The Scandinavians outspend the Americans, but the rest of the 27-nation bloc is skimping on crucial tech and telecoms investment. And the UK? British businesses are below the EU average, spending just over 4 per cent of their R&D budget on tech investment.

The European Commission is responding to this shortfall by recommending the creation of a single, EU-wide open market for the development of new online services in the hopes of encouraging increased spending on software and other technology research. But the details of how this would work remain fuzzy and the EU itself says its attempts to promote an open market for innovation in the telecoms sector is going nowhere.

Looked through this lens, there appears to be a lot more work ahead before the EU can call itself a high-tech superpower.

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Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

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