In the 1980s, a group of internet enthusiasts in the Netherlands founded the NLnet Foundation. Their mission: to improve the internet.
To achieve this, the nonprofit organization supports open-source projects. Its long list of hundreds of funded initiatives includes the protocol that underlies the Fediverse, Mastodon which is seen by many as a Twitter alternative, and the YouTube alternative PeerTube.
One key source of funding for the foundation is the EU. But now, there’s a risk that this funding could be cut off. What happens then? We discuss this with the foundation’s Director of Strategy, Michiel Leenaars. Naturally, we used an open-source video conferencing tool for the conversation: Jitsi.
„I got on the internet as a kid“
netzpolitik.org: Michiel Leenaars, how did you end up working at NLnet?
Michiel Leenaars: I myself have a background in physics and arts that landed me in no place in particular. I got on the internet in 1989 as a kid when my brother started doing computer science. I became a policy advisor for the Netherlands chapter of the Internet Society, started working on the side for the Netherlands Science Foundation and in 2007 I ended up at NLnet Foundation.
It’s a very small organisation with 11 people, so we fit into a small room. We’re not out there for dramatic impact in terms of numbers, but we have projects in 60 countries. Imagine the kind of portfolio you get when you say anything goes, as long as it points at some realistic problem that the internet has. We have people working on open hardware chips, on USB web cams that don’t have any proprietary bits on them, mobile phones, laptops.
Jitsi, for instance, the tool that we’re using right now, is something that we were funding even before it was called Jitsi. I remarked to them that the name SIP Communicator was not really tenable anymore. So, they moved to this Bulgarian name – Jitsi is Bulgarian for wires.
netzpolitik.org: An important part of your work is Next Generation Internet – what is it?
Michiel Leenaars: Next Generation Internet is an initiative by the European Commission. The idea, three years after Snowden, was to put in marginal amounts of money to make sure we don’t miss the beat on any new networking technologies. We won a tender to write a study on how to do that together with Gartner Europe. Writing the study was not as interesting as doing the rounds, getting the input from a lot of different people about what needed to be done.
„Most of the policymakers have no understanding of what we do“
netzpolitik.org: How does it work exactly?
Michiel Leenaars: The Commission was going to put money on the table in different blocks and every block has a label on it, like search or privacy. We were lucky enough to get two of the first three of these programs. Those really proved the point that it was feasible to work on the whole tool chain of the internet even with small grants. This is very different to those monolithic consortia with 50 universities and companies working together to solve a really big problem, except it doesn’t get solved, but everybody gets five years of funding.
Our role is to haul in money to the community and fairly divide it up, with some quality assurance applied to it. We pick out projects that are really smart and that have a meaningful impact. We give them money and help them out with lots of technical support, security audits and so on.
netzpolitik.org: And what does the Commission think about that?
Michiel Leenaars: The hairy situation we find ourselves in is that we’re an engineers’ fund. Engineers get that almost everything that we do is highly relevant to the ecosystem. If you’re a policymaker, you live on the other side of the rock. Most of the policymakers have no understanding of what we do.
It’s a difficult situation to be in. On the one hand, you’re delivering what’s needed to make Europe sovereign. If I look around in our office and think how many other organisations have contributed more to digital sovereignty in Europe in the last decade, I’d be hard-pressed to find good candidates. On the other hand, it sometimes takes a long time for people to get the idea. There’s a bit of a Cassandra complex.
„We have the world’s best people working on the best software“
netzpolitik.org: Where could policymakers help you out?
Michiel Leenaars: The procurement side. That is where it hurts the most. I gave a keynote a couple of years ago at the Commission where I said: You have three vendors for VPN systems, and all three had security breaches. We funded WireGuard, formally proven by two independent teams. And I can give you this stuff for free. You’re paying through the nose for the broken stuff. We have the world’s best people working on the best software, you bought mediocre stuff that is broken. You don’t even have to buy it, you can just download it. And yet it’s not on the desktop of any civil servant today.
netzpolitik.org: One problem for this could be maintenance. You fund research on projects, but what happens when the funds for a project run out?
Michiel Leenaars: We of course try for projects to be self-sustaining. We think this is best done in a Commons way, because you don’t need to make money on, say, the Linux kernel to use it or to contribute to it. It’s paid for by people who use it that have engineers and want it to keep working. We think this holds true for the vast majority of technology.
We try to bring our projects to maturity within the scope of a grant. We have them security audited, we have them packaged, we have them checked for copyright compliance. For instance, we funded an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. The person working on it now works for WordPress. I think that’s a very attractive model.
„We’re still eagerly anticipating some miracle“
netzpolitik.org: Speaking of running out of funds: The Commission might not give any new money to Next Generation Internet this year. What does that mean for you?
Michiel Leenaars: At the moment, we’re in a good state. We currently have the largest fund we’ve been able to get our hands on so far. It’s really about the slightly longer-term future. We usually stagger programmes by launching new ones when we get new budget. Then people can start submitting their projects.
At a certain point, we can’t accept new projects into programmes anymore because the money is fully allocated. Ongoing projects still keep going, of course, but in parallel you should set up a new programme to let new projects in. Otherwise, the cycle stops. Because the Commission planning for 2025 is delayed, it’s now clear that there will not be a new budget at all this year. That’s unlucky because there was a 2024 hiatus as well. So our existing programmes with budgets from 2022 and 2023 will continue to run and continue to bear fruit. We are open for business. However, once the current budget runs out, seeds stop being planted.
Next Generation Internet depends on the political discussion, and that has been silent since last summer. We’re still eagerly anticipating some miracle where somebody high up in the hierarchy says, wait a minute. We just appointed a new Commissioner on tech sovereignty. There’s a programme that has been doing exactly this. Why don’t we make this into an institution and keep on doing this for the rest of days?
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