Abstract

During the recent lockdown period, digital technologies have played a fundamental role. They freed us from a significant part of the lockdown constraints, by enabling smart working, keeping social connections alive, and allowing us to share our feelings and experiences. These technologies were already pervasive, but the pandemic crisis elevated them to a key factor in our lives in an instant, with no prior technical or management planning. The simple fact that in the end everything just seemed to work is a non-trivial outcome. It is worth a detailed analysis. In this paper, we offer some leads, starting from the important distinction between network infrastructure and services. We highlight that these two components represent ecosystems ruled by different dynamics. We claim that, for the future, well-defined goals should be set for the adoption of these technologies, which play such a central role in citizens’ lives, and effective policies are needed to keep their deployment aligned with said goals, unlike what has happened until now.