José Luis Escrivá receives La Vanguardia at the brand new headquarters of his ministry in Madrid. The smell of new is perceived as soon as you cross the door that gives access to an open space, full of light and windows with great views of the banks of the renovated Manzanares River in Madrid. It has more similarities with the spaces in which startups usually settle, than with the ancient concept of ministry associated with the concrete masses of Paseo de la Castellana. New building, new position and this will be the first year in which a specific minister for Digital Transformation in Spain walks through the Mobile World Congress that opens today in Barcelona.
What do you expect from this edition that, like its work plan, has Artificial Intelligence as one of the strategic points?
Mobile is the great world forum for digitalization, but above all for the exchange of opinions. My agenda is full of meetings, events and multilateral panels with private and public actors and then many bilateral meetings with other ministers and with large representatives of the industry.
What more immediate challenges does this new technology require?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to transform our lives. There’s no doubt. We have a strategy that is based on two pillars. One prepares the country for the impact, generally positive, that AI is going to have, transforming many economic activities at an impressive pace. At the same time, it entails risks and there are activities, as European legislation has already done, that must be prohibited. A debate is needed in which all social actors and citizen representatives participate to set the limits.
Some voices in the sector say that Europe and Spain are rushing with these limits and that may have an impact on the arrival of investors
No, I don’t have this impression. In fact, this week I signed a protocol with Microsoft, a world leader in artificial intelligence applications, and it feels very comfortable in the regulatory framework we have, as demonstrated by the announced investment of 2 billion. The big private promoters of AI are absolutely aware that limits must be set for a technology with so much capacity to influence our lives.
You also announced a cybersecurity law. What will it regulate?
We want to give institutional status to the current cybersecurity mechanisms, which work well as evidenced by the fact that Spain is the third European country in cybersecurity indices, and give them the status of law, something that we will address in the second semester. Meanwhile, we work together with the National Cybersecurity Institute (Incibe) to address other relevant issues. For example, in addition to serving to report cyber attacks, we have just enabled the 017 service number to also advise on issues of cyber protection of minors, parental controls, suspicions of bullying, etc.
You are now leading the deployment of the largest Perte linked to European funds, that of chips, endowed with 12.5 billion. After more than a year, only two public calls are known for a total of 105 million. Why so late?
I would not speak in any case of delay, on the contrary, I would invite you to see how long it takes other countries to mature similar operations. We have already deployed almost 500 million linked to this Perte.
There are 9,000 million to start up two chip factories. Only one interested party is known, Broadcom, which has not even revealed where it intends to establish itself. What are investors demanding?
Spain is a very attractive country with magnificent connectivity and green energy, an important element because all the facilities associated with AI such as data centers require significant amounts of energy and very well-trained human capital. In the first stage, we are prioritizing training. As for investments, we are committed to those linked to innovation, which is where the added value is and on which an ecosystem can be built. The factory that assembles them all is only one possibility and we do not necessarily have to go in that direction. For example, the installation in Spain, in Malaga, of IMEC – a world reference center for microelectronics – is more linked to the qualification and prefabrication of chips and there is only another one like it in the world in Belgium. Regarding Broadcom, a series of technical requirements are being finalized and from there the location of the project will be decided.
The European Commission has approved the merger of Orange and MásMóvil, with conditions. How do you evaluate this decision?
Contrary to what the Commission proposes, we do not see any competition problem in the telecommunications sector in Spain, and we did not see the need to establish remedies or conditions in terms of spectrum transfer. The Commission wanted to take this spectrum transfer up to 90 megahertz (MHz) and we have worked to reduce that amount to 60 MHz, which was what the parties had presented, and the Commission has understood it that way.
The operation is in your field. Will the Spanish Government give authorization without further conditions?
No, authorizations are not at all a mere procedure. This operation, along with another parallel one [the purchase of Vodafone Spain by the British fund Zegona], affect almost 50% of the telecommunications market and more than two thirds of the total radio spectrum assigned for mobile communications. All of this, together with the fact that it is a strategic sector with critical infrastructure, means that we have to look at these operations with absolute care and, of course, from a strategic point of view.
Could you lower those spectrum requirements?
No, that is something that has already been agreed and will not be modified. What we are working on with the companies is that the resolution approved by the Council of Ministers makes explicit a series of investment commitments and sustainability of these investments with an eye toward strategic areas such as the deployment of fiber and 5G, such as and as proposed by the European Commission in the recently published White Paper that lays the foundations for the future Digital Network Act.
In what amount?
That will be seen.
At what point is the entry of the Saudi Telecom fund into Telefónica and the Sepi purchases?
There is nothing new on that topic.
Another pending issue is identifying risk providers for telecommunications investments. Will there be a list of banned companies?
Spain has already established a position in this regard and we do not see the need to publish any explicit list. There will be certain deployments of critical elements of 5G networks in which we will have to give our opinion, but we will do so by studying each specific case.
Vodafone and Huawei have appealed the granting of rural 5G licenses because Huawei is indirectly identified as a risk supplier and favors Telefónica. Are these clauses harming competition?
The rural 5G aid programs incorporate an obligation clause on the beneficiaries to replace the infrastructure deployed with this aid at their expense, if they have been deployed with suppliers that are declared high risk. This responds to the European Commission’s insistence that no money from the EU be allocated to high-risk suppliers, but in Spain this declaration has not been made, therefore we consider that there is no impact on competition.
On the other leg of your ministry, the one that concerns the public service, are you going to cancel the possibility of requiring an appointment to contact the administration?
The starting point has to be a regulatory modification so that we establish that it is effectively guaranteed that citizens have the right to communicate and interact with the public administration through the channel they choose. This requires a regulatory change to article 14 of the Common Administrative Procedure Law, including the express prohibition of the mandatory nature of prior appointment.
Will you increase the number of officials?
The year 2024 will be the last year in which the replacement rate is in force, which has perpetuated pre-existing structures without taking into account the new needs of public administrations. We must move from a short-term vision to a medium-term perspective, with strategic planning and evaluation of public policies. Therefore, the new model must make it possible to determine what type of officials and what profiles are necessary. The model, which must be agreed upon with the social agents, will allow more flexibility for the different departments so that they can propose their human resources policy.
How do you assess the recent ruling of the Court of Justice of the EU on temporary public workers?
The high degree of temporary employment in the public sector has three fundamental causes: the replacement rate as a mechanism for determining workforces in the public administration in the absence of strategic planning in human resources; the lack of regularity in public employment calls and the slowness of the processes and, finally, the dissonance between human resource needs in public services and real financing capacity. We are acting on each of these causes to prevent this large pocket of temporality from being generated again.
