Project Syndicate - Europe’s Tech Firms Need Regulation to Grow
Europe director Max von Thun argues that Europe’s response to Trump-era pressure on digital regulation must combine tough enforcement against Big Tech with major investment in homegrown technology, warning that efforts to weaken landmark laws like the AI Act and GDPR threaten European sovereignty and democratic security.
Europeans have long lamented the continent’s lack of globally competitive tech companies. But since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the goal of ending Europe’s reliance on US-based tech giants has taken on new urgency. With US tech oligarchs interfering in European elections and the Trump administration seeking to sabotage European digital regulation, this dependency is no longer just an economic problem; it poses a grave threat to security, sovereignty, and democracy in Europe. Europeans are well aware of this, but are of two views on how best to respond. One camp argues that, far from bowing to Trumpian pressure, the European Union should double down on efforts to regulate Big Tech, pursuing an even more ambitious approach that would break the tech giants’ market dominance and mitigate their products’ social harms. The other camp calls for a massive increase in public and private investment in tech infrastructure, both to limit Europe’s vulnerability to foreign coercion and to strengthen its economic competitiveness. These positions are not as far apart as they might seem. Robust, well-designed, and vigorously enforced regulation could neutralize the advantages of incumbent tech firms, create breathing room for challengers, and entrench the shared standards and norms that underpin both democracy and open, decentralized markets. At the same time, the existence of credible European social-media platforms, AI models, and cloud-computing capabilities would greatly strengthen EU competitiveness and sovereignty. Unfortunately, the complementary nature of these positions is rarely acknowledged. Instead, the “competitiveness first” camp tends either to dismiss regulation as a waste of time, noting that past efforts to rein in Big Tech have always fallen short, or to condemn it for supposedly thwarting Europe’s tech ambitions. The latter view, on display at last month’s Digital Sovereignty Summit in Berlin, helps to explain why the European Commission is now rushing to water down landmark digital legislation, including the AI Act and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), through its so-called “Omnibus” package.
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