The European Union’s New Take on Tech: Make Europe Great Again

Mark Scott is a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press.

BRUSSELS — Anyone working on tech policy who hasn’t spent time in the Belgian capital recently is in for a surprise.

Brussels has long been the heart of the European Union project and a cornerstone of global digital policymaking. It is home to many of the 27-country bloc’s institutions. During the short walk between the European Commission’s Berlaymont Building and the European Parliament, visitors are likely to hear almost all the official EU languages — and often many others — in what is almost universally known as the Brussels Bubble.

But on all things digital, that bubble has burst.

For decades, EU officials prided themselves on forging ahead with wave after wave of digital regulation. The goal: to promote democratic values like fairness, competitiveness, and the rule of law in an increasingly technological age where the bloc repeatedly fails to create domestic champions to take on larger rivals from the United States and, more recently, China.

For those in Washington and elsewhere, these rules — on data protection, digital competition, platform governance, and artificial intelligence — smacked of protectionism. Europe couldn’t innovate to keep up, went the theory, so it had to rely on dirty regulatory tricks to support its smaller tech firms to compete with the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook.

That view fundamentally misunderstood the EU’s approach to tech.

Yes, a fragmented internal market had hobbled efforts to create EU equivalents to the likes of Apple and Alibaba. But Europe’s digital rulebook, which has recently extended to include the Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act and Artificial Intelligence Act, was designed more to protect local citizens from harm than to hobble international companies in favor of European rivals.

It was part of Brussels' “third way,” sandwiched somewhere between Washington’s hands-off stance on tech and Beijing’s authoritarian control of the digital world.

Yet there has been a significant vibe change at the heart of the EU’s digital agenda.

Senior EU officials and national lawmakers are now more willing to use all levers of the EU project—including the bloc’s hefty regulatory playbook—to overtly favor national companies and promote Europe’s wider geopolitical interests over foreign companies’ and other countries’ tech ambitions.

Confronted with Washington’s reinvigorated “MAGA” agenda, Brussels, too, wants to “Make Europe Great Again” via a combination of mass public spending on digital infrastructure, open skepticism of allowing American and Chinese tech giants to operate unfettered across the economic bloc, and — in some instances — the weaponization of the EU’s digital rules to tilt the scales in favor of European firms.

This shift started in the latter days of the previous European Commission’s five-year tenure, which concluded in late 2024.

It included overtly political attempts to use the bloc’s online safety rules to target the likes of X and TikTok. It included pledges to spend billions of dollars on European taxpayers’ euros to jumpstart the bloc’s flagging semiconductor industry. It included an abortive attempt to create a EU-wide rival to US cloud computing giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

That more transactional digital game plan has continued during the second term of returning European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen amid heightened geopolitical tensions between Brussels and Washington, its once closest ally.

Assertions from senior US officials and leading American tech executives that the EU’s digital regulation is akin to outright trade sanctions has bristled many within the Brussels Bubble, including those with the ability to shape the bloc’s internal market and digital diplomacy. If others are willing to play dirty, goes the thinking, then why shouldn’t we?

As negotiations continue to avert a transatlantic trade war, there is a brewing internal fight among the 27-country bloc for the hearts and minds of its collective digital agenda. Currently, any form of EU retaliation against future US tariffs is unlikely to include direct attacks against US tech giants.

On the one hand, there are officials from many Eastern European and Nordic countries who would prefer the EU to remain open for business for outsiders, even while doubling down on public investments to jumpstart the bloc’s unfulfilled ambitions to be a global tech champion.

On the other hand, there are policymakers from many Western European countries who would like Brussels to use public funds, regulatory power and potential trade sanctions to promote European companies to solve European problems for European citizens.

This fight will continue throughout the five-year term of the current European Commission. It is the inevitable tension from an economic and political union made up of 27 countries, all with their own digital policy objectives. The EU is not a country like the US or China. It is a federal system where national priorities often take precedence over EU-wide objectives.

But in the push-and-pull internal diplomacy to set the EU’s digital goals, the pendulum has significantly shifted toward a more transactional, zero-sum, and antagonistic approach to outsiders — one that, until recently, was more a myth perceived in places like Washington than a reality on the streets of Brussels.

That includes potentially prioritizing domestic companies for lucrative public tenders for digital infrastructure projects. It involves a new paradigm to slash regulatory red tape, primarily to remove perceived onerous burdens on Europe’s small businesses. And it’s an increasingly open willingness to pick fights with international partners — most notably the US — in what many EU officials now view as a generational shift in the transatlantic relationship.