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Robin Berjon
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Robin Berjon

@robin.berjon.com
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Bringing democracy to the internet. Brussels, 🇪🇺. • tech, governance, science, politics, philosophy, infrastructure, cats, terrible puns • blog: https://berjon.com/ • fmr W3C, NYT, ScienceAI, Protocol Labs • he/him/Ishmael • Signal robin.77

Robin Berjon
Robin BerjonSep 28, 2026
A Real Digital Omnibus for European Competitiveness and Security
This document is offered as an expert contribution to ongoing discussions about the data aspects of the Digital Omnibus. Drawn from my experience in digital policy, technology strategy, and digital business, I find that the Commission's current Omnibus proposal contains a small number of provisions that achieve genuine simplification and strengthen the reliability of the regulatory environment, alongside a larger number of provisions that, however well-intentioned, would produce outcomes contrary to the legislative aims set out in the Commission's own framing. My purpose is to provide the framework and background information necessary for trilogue interlocutors to identify which provisions can be retained, which can be improved, and which should be reconsidered, so that the final Omnibus achieves the impact that its proponents seek.
Robin Berjon
Robin BerjonSep 7, 2026
Media Media
The authoritarians are winning, we can all see that. It wouldn't be the worst thing if the pro-democracy camp stopped being naive about social media.
Robin Berjon
Robin BerjonJul 20, 2026
Rum Baba
Rum babas have a reputation for being hard to bake, and indeed if you look around you can find some really intricate recipes. But, having tried a few, frankly, I've never found the extra complexity to be worth it. At the end of the day, it's a sponge cake with run syrup, whipped cream, and rum. Don't overthink it — especially after the rum.
Robin Berjon
Robin BerjonJun 18, 2026
The Retweeting Class
I have often found myself confounded by the behaviour of some people who seem impervious to reality — like the people still on X today. Here, I try to understand what grounds their epistemology and its consequences, and what that means for the rest of us. Being committed to a better future is where genuine seriousness is, and that seriousness can only be approached in a spirit of embodied, determined, relentless hope.
Robin Berjon
Robin BerjonMay 6, 2026
The Direction of Interoperability
Talking in terms of horizontal or vertical interoperability is too constrictive a mental model to understand what interoperability does. Doing better matters, and it's right within reach.
Robin Berjon
Robin BerjonDec 9, 2025
Fascintern Media
We are facing a coordinated international fascist movement that works with explicit backing from Moscow, Washington, and tech monopolies, and is propagating itself through its own media apparatus. Yet people who claim to side with democracy keep doing work to support Fascintern media because they misunderstand how it works. This needs to change.
Robin Berjon
Robin BerjonFeb 25, 2025
Digital Sovereignty
Digital sovereignty has a bad reputation. In internet governance circles, sovereignty is considered awkward enough to be referred to by as the "s-word." It is often associated with misguided attempts at returning to the era of national champions, like building a French search engine or a European Google, or worse with the eternal boogeyman that is the "splinternet." It doesn't have to be this way!
Robin Berjon
Robin BerjonSep 23, 2024
The Infrastructure Shock
The explosion of digital infrastructure systems over the past thirty years may be the biggest but least recognised shock delivered by the internet. We need to develop the governance capacity to manage it and force it out of hands of the democracy-hostile corporations that control it today.
Robin Berjon
Robin BerjonJul 15, 2024
Ethicswishing
People mean well but ethics is hard. In tech, we have a knack for applying ethics in the most useless ways possible — even when we earnestly want to improve humankind's lot. Why does this matter, why are we failing, and how can we fix it?
Robin Berjon
Robin BerjonJun 17, 2024
The Public Interest Internet
What if the internet were public interest technology? Is that too wildly speculative? I think not. I am not talking about a utopian project here — a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free. But while there is a lot of solid thinking about various digital issues or pieces of internet infrastructure (much of which I rely upon here), I have yet to read to an answer to this question: What global digital architecture should we assemble if we take seriously the idea that the internet should be public interest technology?
Robin Berjon
Robin BerjonMar 22, 2024
Transmutations
We know from experience and empirical analysis that open source and open standards projects drift into oligarchies that struggle to reform themselves and become ossified. Often, we can simply let them die and replace them with fresher alternatives, but when that's a costly option we can learn from theoretical models of institutional change to understand how to compost the oligarchy and regrow the project from within.
Robin Berjon
Robin BerjonDec 1, 2023
The Chimeralogists
Over the past few months I've been having many conversations with people who all have a particular set of skills but whose job titles are all over the place. I believe that we form a more coherent group than we realise, that this novel role exists for a good reason, and that we would benefit from making that known.