Has the European ICT sector a chance to be competitive ?

The ICT sector is featured by technical progress, convergence and systems integration. This leads to risks of monopolization regimes at the core with higher competition regimes at the periphery. Moreover, some specific component of the system may be essential for its evolution. In particular, networking to some extent creates the system, while software (notably operating systems) is the “glue” which holds it together. In this context, the European ICT industry is potentially smashed between the cost advantages of Asian countries such as China, and the inventiveness and dynamism of the US industry. The way out of this difficult situation is to create in Europe the conditions of restoring knowledge accumulation. By concentrating on an ambitious project of open source software production in embarked and domestic systems, Europe could reach several objectives: to make freely accessible an essential facility of networks, to stimulate competition, to help reaching the Lisbon objectives and to restore the European competitiveness in ICT.