Scenario: How to use €100 billion for a better internet?

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Imagine the following scenario:

It’s 1st December 2025 and you’ve just been sworn in as part of the government of the Federel Republic of Germany. While the President is giving the usual speech, surrounded by your new collegues and cabinet members, you drift off into your thoughts.

In the next four years, you’ll be leading the Federal Ministry for Digital and Internet, which has just been split off from the former BMDV. While your party is the smallest in the coalition with 12 percent, this result is still a huge success, considering how recently it was founded. Having been elected mainly by young to middle aged voters on a basis of country-wide modernization, strenghening of civil liberties and the dream of a truly digitalized Germany leading european technology in a more free, open, sovereign and better future for all. In the coalition negotiations, your party has given up on many other important topics and positions to now have a great position to fulfill these core promises: Besides your own position, you’ve also secured the Federal Ministry of Justice and a €100 billion fund, similar to the Zeitenwende from 2022, to be spent in addition to the regular budget, to achieve your goals. This is a dream come true, and you’re grateful to have been provided with such powerful tools.

With the speech almost finished, a shiver runs down your spine. You now have the incredibly rare chance to actually change the world, if just a little. You take a deep breath and feel the stress of many months campainign and negotiating drop from your shoulders, making room for excitement. It’s time to get to work.

TLDR: You’re leading the german Ministry for Digital and Internet and have, in addition to the regular budget, been granted a 100.000.000.000 EUR fund. Assuming you’re basically free in what to do with all that, how would you use this to improve the internet and our digital lives?

While this isn’t supposed to be complete fantasy and still retain some basis in reality, it’s also just a fun what-if. You can assume that somehow, politically everything works out more or less. Germany is just a stand-in and you can ofc also focus on some smaller aspects.

This is also not supposed to be a discussion about general politics, so please, focus on the technological side of things. The rules of this forum obviously apply. If this itself violates these rules or the moderation effort is simply too much, I apologize - please just remove this.

So, what does the digital world really need? I’m interested in your ideas/approaches!

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They already have a better and private internet setup. You send an email to government agency and they reply by post.

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I would buy Twitter and then sell it to Eugen Rochko for 50 cents.

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This is not really a question of money but of political will. ie Linux is free but public admins. are hooked up to Windows. That being said they are some things a government could do :

  • Fund “critical infrastructure” FOSS software : Linux and the packages it depends on
  • Fund research on privacy tools, like with the EU financing Tuta Drive
  • Support existing projects development like the US Gov with Tor Browser. Maybe do this to European projects like OpenSUSE, Cryptpad, etc
  • Give money to open-source (and free) projects when you use them in the public sector to incentivize them to catch-up to private alternatives to gain marketshare
  • Make a publicly-funded “Center for Privacy & Security” pushing the barriers of encryption.
  • Work on making the Level 1&2 more private by replacing UDP&TCP (in the long term)

Honestly, many of those initiatives are cheap. For example Tor only receives 20 millions of dollars per year.

I do think that a €100B investment in revamping the internet would be needed, but over a 10-20y period.

But let’s not forget that EU govs still want to spy on citzens.

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