ITI Welcomes Irish Council Presidency and Outlines Tech Policy Priorities for the Semester Ahead
BRUSSELS – Global tech trade association ITI, the Information Technology Industry Council, welcomes Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union and looks forward to building on the progress made under Cyprus on the EU’s tech rulebook.
ITI released its recommendations (opens in a new tab) for the Irish semester, calling on the presidency to use this window to strengthen Europe’s competitiveness, resilience, and innovation capacity at a time when the global landscape demands urgency.
“Ireland takes on the presidency at a moment when Europe’s digital ambitions and its regulatory reality need to come into closer alignment,” said ITI Director General for Europe Guido Lobrano. “The files on the table this semester will shape Europe’s competitiveness, investment, and innovation potential for years to come. Getting them right matters.”
Europe’s tech rulebook has grown significantly in recent years, and with it the compliance burden on companies operating across the Single Market. ITI’s recommendations urge the Irish presidency to champion meaningful regulatory simplification, not just procedural tidying, but genuine reductions in duplication and greater legal certainty for businesses investing in Europe. At the same time, the EU’s ambitions on AI and cloud depend on the availability of secure, sustainable, and scalable digital infrastructure.
Policies that unlock investment, streamline permitting, and take an open, collaborative approach to technological sovereignty will be essential. In the spirit of the Irish presidency’s own motto, “Ní neart go cur le chéile,” strength through unity, Europe’s resilience will come from working with trusted partners, not from standing apart.
ITI also highlights the need for cybersecurity frameworks to be grounded in objective, evidence-based risk assessments and calls for greater simplification efforts to ensure that companies can spend more time improving cybersecurity and less time navigating overlapping compliance processes.
“Ireland is well positioned to connect Europe’s competitiveness agenda with its digital policy agenda,” Lobrano added. “That means not just advancing new legislation, but making the existing framework more coherent, more predictable, and genuinely capable of supporting innovation at scale.”