While the EU battles American tech giants on earth, it helps them with free data beamed down from orbit.
Brussels pitches its Copernicus Earth observation space program as a force for global good, helping emergency responders worldwide and boosting the EU’s soft power. But it’s also giving a crucial boost to U.S. tech companies like Google and Amazon at the same time that EU competition authorities crack down on their market dominance.
Europe’s competition team fined Google €1.49 billion last month over its advertising policy, bringing the total penalties imposed by Brussels on the company to over €8 billion.
That’s roughly equivalent to the public cash spent on Copernicus — which monitors earthquakes, floods, forest fires and snowstorms both within the EU and beyond its borders — but which Google uses to drive its free Google Earth high-definition maps. Amazon, also in trouble with EU competition authorities, uses it as part of its AWS cloud computing service.
“They are commercializing and making money from it,” said one EU diplomat who played a key role in developing the bloc’s space program. “This is the question, who has access at what price?”
A photograph captured by a Copernicus satellite shows a lump of ice more than twice the size of Luxembourg break off an ice shelf | ESA via Getty Images
The main point of the billions spent wasn’t to line the pockets of big business. The EU is hoping that Copernicus will pay off in increasing the bloc’s diplomatic heft and global profile by providing crucial information on natural disasters like Cyclone Idai that recently battered southern Africa.
“We are not very good at promoting ourselves like the Americans,” said Françoise Villette, who works on running the Copernicus emergency response program at the European Commission. “Hopefully we look like the good guys but it’s not the sole purpose.”
Slapping fines on tech giants with one hand while handing them free satellite data with the other may strike some as strange but European space officials don’t see a problem.
The program’s goal was never purely commercial. EU officials see it a way to project soft power.
Jan Wörner, boss of the European Space Agency, said the fact that tech giants are using Copernicus data is good for the program and for Europe.
“If Google and Amazon are using the data to develop some products then it’s used worldwide, that’s good,” said Woerner, whose Paris-based intergovernmental organization is not part of the EU but co-funds and runs Copernicus. “To have free and open data access is the right way. It’s good for mankind. Our responsibility is for the whole world.”
Others note that Europe has benefitted from freely available data from other sources.
While some Europeans moan about giving up their satellite data for free, many were happy to draw on America’s GPS and Landsat programs for the last 30 years, said Agnieszka Lukaszczyk, who runs European affairs at Planet, a U.S.-based Earth observation company that uses Copernicus mapping but operates its own network of satellites.
“You can make the argument that the Googles and Amazons and others are using the data but that’s the nature of the ‘global good,’” she said. While Planet is based in the U.S., much of its mission-control activities and data processing are just off a busy shopping street in Berlin.
“If you’re going to restrict certain companies from participating due to protectionism you’re going to limit the scope of the Copernicus program,” said Lukaszczyk. “We’re the only company that is able to monitor the Earth on a constant basis. We are adding an extra layer to the data produced.”
However, the U.S. government is reportedly considering reimposing charges for its Landsat data, which have been free since 2008. A decision is expected later this year.
“If the Landsat program reverts to asking users to pay for data, our group worries that it may indirectly encourage other programs to do the same,” wrote Zhe Zhu, an assistant professor of natural resources and the environment at the University of Connecticut who is part of a group of researchers using Landsat data.
Seeking strategy
So far there are no EU plans to start charging for Copernicus data.
The bloc is now firming up its €16 billion space spending for the next budget cycle, and figuring out where Copernicus fits into that vision. The idea is to give it a further €5.8 billion. But with Brexit set to slash the size of the future EU kitty and populist parties raging against spending, Brussels needs to show the outlay is worth it.
“How can you justify strategic use of Copernicus if it’s not based on strategic policy?” said the EU official of future plans.
The EU estimates Copernicus services will yield between €16.2 billion and €21.3 billion in economic gains over the coming years. But that’s a fuzzy measurement, lumping together the profit companies are expected to extract from program services like ocean-monitoring or climate change, according to one EU diplomat.
The satellites carry the same suite of cutting-edge instruments to measure oceans, land, ice and atmosphere | Stephane Corvaja/ESA via Getty Images
However, the program’s goal was never purely commercial. EU officials see it as a way to project soft power.
“I think [Copernicus] has really the potential to increase the visibility of the European Union,” Michael Pulch, the EU’s ambassador to Australia, told POLITICO. “It delivers directly when it’s needed … and we are providing this to our partners free of charge.”
Geoscience Australia used Copernicus data to monitor catastrophic flooding in Queensland earlier this year, and has requested mapping services three times since 2016.
In addition to Australia and the current flooding in Mozambique, EU diplomats have also deployed the system to report on the impact of December’s devastating tsunami in Indonesia. An EU team also recently presented the system to policymakers in the Philippines.
“Very often people just don’t know that the EU is providing this,” said Pulch. “And I think we need to do more to spread the good word. We’re doing good, and people need to understand where that comes from.”
Ground control
The heart of the emergency response operation is a control room on a dim Brussels back street not far from the European Commission’s headquarters. Here, screens show international news networks CNN, France24, Russia Today and Al-Jazeera above a row of digital clocks and charts feeding in meteorological data.
Staffers are on the job around the clock, monitoring information and replying to requests to activate Copernicus’ emergency response service.
“Most of the time it’s natural disasters, but we also use it to monitor displaced people,” said Spyros Afentoulidis, deputy team leader at the program’s Emergency Response Coordination Center. “For example, we can see the speed at which a refugee camp is growing.”
Analytics include identifying collapsed buildings, roads and bridges.
EU countries — and any of the bloc’s embassies abroad — can formally trigger the system through the control room; requests for military uses are redirected elsewhere, Afentoulidis said. The data analysis created with the imagery is provided for free, with costs covered by the EU budget.
Analytics include identifying collapsed buildings, roads and bridges in either a delineation map like those prepared for Australia, which simply shows the land area affected by flooding, or a more technical gradient map which illustrates the scale of disruption around an event, such as the Indonesian tsunami.
Since Copernicus launched in 2012, the system has been activated for emergency response more than 300 times. Around 60 percent of those calls come from EU countries and others that pay in for its upkeep, like Norway, Afentoulidis said. The rest come in response to global crises as they spring up. “We didn’t wait for the Indonesian authorities to ask, we took the initiative,” said Afentoulidis.
Even the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency has activated the system six times since 2016, instead of waiting for NASA to provide comparable information.
Laura Kayali contributed reporting.