EU Observer - How the EU should stand up to Trump's Tech Bros oligarchy
Europe director Max von Thun argues that the EU should resist US pressure to ease Big Tech regulations and instead strengthen its digital sovereignty for economic and security reasons.
Former EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager used to laugh at how US lawmakers on Capitol Hill sneered at her when she first targeted American tech companies for breaking EU competition rules in the pre-Trump era.
As a returning Donald Trump takes aim at EU regulators, promising Apple CEO Tim Cook not to “let them take advantage of our companies,” no laughter is to be heard in the Berlaymont.
Worse still, commission president Ursula von der Leyen seems to be considering tearing up the Union’s brand-new digital competition rules as a way of staving off even worse from Trump — from a full-blown trade war to US abandonment of Nato.
According to the Financial Times, the European Commission is reconsidering ongoing probes into anti-competitive practices by Meta, Apple and Google. But the EU executive has denied these claims. The investigations were launched under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a flagship EU legislative initiative seeking to stop large tech companies from abusing their market dominance, which came into force only last year.
The EU's new tech and competition commissioners, Henna Virkkunen and Teresa Ribera, have tried to calm jangled nerves has tried to calm jangled nerves by insisting that the investigations are proceeding as planned.
But the EU’s collective silence on Big Tech’s increasingly brazen interference in Europe’s sovereign affairs – from Elon Musk’s aggressive promotion of the German far-right on X to Mark Zuckerberg urging Trump to protect Meta from European “censorship” – speaks volumes.
Trump re-enters the White House having promised to impose across-the-board tariffs on EU goods and services unless the bloc ramps up its purchases of American fossil fuels. The US is by far the EU’s largest export market and new trade barriers would damage the bloc's already reeling economy.
Dropping, pausing or slow walking investigations of American tech giants under the DMA, competition law or other EU regulations would be one way of currying favor with the incoming Trump administration.
But as French liberal MEP Stéphanie Yon-Courtin, one of the European Parliament’s lead negotiators on the DMA, rightly argued in a recent letter to von der Leyen, caving to US political pressure on tech oversight would set a “dangerous precedent” that “undermines the legitimacy of our regulatory framework” and emboldens further attacks on EU rules.
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