NGI Zero Commons Fund Reclaim the public nature of the internet (nlnet.nl)

The NGI Zero Commons Fund, backed by the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, Horizon Europe (grant No. 101135429) and Swiss SERI, is launching an open call to rebuild the internet as a public commons. Between now and 2027 it will award €21.6M in small-to-medium R&D grants (typical proposals €5k–€50k, with the option to scale promising projects). The fund takes a full‑stack approach—happy to support work from libre silicon and P2P infrastructure to middleware and end‑user apps—and requires project outputs to be released under free or open source licenses. Applicants will also receive non‑financial support; the program emphasizes troubleshooting entrenched technical debt and building shared building blocks that can achieve critical mass. For the AI/ML community the fund is consequential: it explicitly targets open data, open AI, standards, interoperability and right‑to‑repair principles that enable reproducibility, scrutiny and ecosystem resilience. By funding open tooling, distributed architectures and standards-driven components, NGI Zero aims to reduce single‑vendor lock‑in, improve long‑term operational availability, and create safer deployment pathways for emerging tech (e.g., generative AI, intelligent mediators, AR/VR). Successful projects could become reusable primitives for research and production, accelerating trustworthy, auditable AI systems and decentralised infrastructure aligned with the Next Generation Internet vision.