Big Tech’s New Adversaries in Europe

If the past 5 years of EU tech rules could instrumentality quality form, they would embody Thierry Breton. The bombastic commissioner, with his swoop of achromatic hair, became the nationalist look of Brussels’ irritation with American tech giants, touring Silicon Valley past summertime to personally punctual the manufacture of looming regulatory deadlines.

Combative and outspoken, Breton warned that Apple had spent excessively agelong “squeezing” different companies retired of the market. In a lawsuit against TikTok, helium emphasized, “our children are not guinea pigs for societal media.”

His confrontational cognition to the CEOs themselves was disposable successful his posts connected X. In the lead-up to Musk’s interrogation with Donald Trump, Breton posted a vague but threatening letter connected his relationship reminding Musk determination would beryllium consequences if helium utilized his level to amplify “harmful content.” Last year, helium published a photograph with Mark Zuckerberg, declaring a caller EU motto of “move accelerated to hole things”—a jibe astatine the notorious aboriginal Facebook slogan. And successful a 2023 gathering with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Breton reportedly got him to hold to an “AI pact” connected the spot, earlier tweeting the agreement, making it hard for Pichai to backmost out.

Yet successful this week’s reshuffle of apical EU jobs, Breton resigned—a determination helium alleged was owed to backroom dealing betwixt EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and French president Emmanuel Macron.

“I'm definite [the tech giants are] blessed Mr. Breton volition go, due to the fact that helium understood you person to deed shareholders’ pockets erstwhile it comes to fines,” says Umberto Gambini, a erstwhile advisor astatine the EU Parliament and present a spouse astatine consultancy Forward Global.

Breton is to beryllium efficaciously replaced by the Finnish person Henna Virkkunen, from the center-right EPP Group, who has antecedently worked connected the Digital Services Act.

“Her benignant volition surely beryllium little brutal and possibly little disposable connected X than Breton,” says Gambini. “It could beryllium an accidental to restart and reboot the relations.”

Little is known astir Virkkunen’s cognition to Big Tech’s relation successful Europe’s economy. But her relation has been reshaped to acceptable von der Leyen’s priorities for her adjacent five-year term. While Breton was the commissioner for the interior market, Virkkunen volition enactment with the aforesaid squad but run nether the upgraded rubric of enforcement vice president for tech sovereignty, information and democracy, meaning she reports straight to von der Leyen.

The 27 commissioners, who signifier von der Leyen’s caller squad and are each tasked with a antithetic country of focus, inactive person to beryllium approved by the European Parliament—a process that could instrumentality weeks.

“[Previously], it was very, precise wide that the committee was ambitious erstwhile it came to reasoning astir and proposing caller authorities to antagonistic each these antithetic threats that they had perceived, particularly those posed by large exertion platforms,” says Mathias Vermeulen, nationalist argumentation manager astatine Brussels-based consultancy AWO. “That is not a governmental precedence anymore, successful the consciousness that authorities has been adopted and present has to beryllium enforced.”