State smartphone, the incentive that is not there

Even if launched with great fanfare by many newspapers (rarely in a balanced way, and more than anything else as yet another lever of praise or criticism of the government's work), the so-called "state smartphone" is something that does not actually exist yet. . Not only that: the project is so original and difficult to implement that it will be difficult to find the way to approval. Furthermore, there is a whole series of aspects that should be investigated from many points of view, because the measure risks not being inclusive, not balanced, nor efficient in the absence of precise specifications.

The State smartphone, more doubts than certainties

But above all, it must be said explicitly for the purpose of a necessary clarity: the State smartphone to date is only a series of sentences included in an amendment to the Maneuver to be approved by at the end of the year, a short text that still has to be examined by the Budget Commission and which would later be examined by the Chambers.

The idea is that of a budget of 20 million euros to provide families with access to a series of tools deemed essential for accessing the benefits of digital transformation. The beneficiary families would be identified by means of ISEE (under 20 thousand euros): the smartphone would be granted on free loan for one year and would be equipped with connectivity to allow access to the indicated resources. The IO app would be preloaded and the SPID would be a necessary requirement to be able to access the benefit. Finally, the subscription for reading "two press" would be included. The benefit would be the exclusive prerogative of only one member for each family, thus imagining to enable an entire nucleus with the minimum investment.

By doing so, the family would potentially be enabled for the State Cashback, as well as for the Receipt Lottery . In short, the basic idea is to provide an enabling element with which to draw on benefits otherwise not achievable. However, there are so many doubts and such that the Budget Commission will probably not be able to let the text proceed except through a decisive reasoning of too many fundamental questions: is a smartphone really necessary, or would it perhaps be better to extend the scope of the bonuses already in place? Isn't thinking of bonuses for providing digital tools (now widespread in every family) a wrong approach to the problem?

From a technical point of view it would be easy to raise more than one objection. From a political point of view it seems to be more a provocation than a project with an actual ambition for approval. From a strategic point of view it seems the umpteenth mistake of an incentive policy for digitization, a bipartisan corollary of a history of attempts often based on bonuses rarely able to produce effective benefits both in the short and long term.