Europe is hurtling toward digital vassalage. Under Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, EU laws to tackle tech giants have been either not applied or delayed, for fear of offending Donald Trump. Now leaked documents reveal that the European Commission plans to gut a central part of Europe’s digital rulebook. This will hurt Europe’s innovators and hand the future of Europe’s tech sovereignty to US firms.
Once Europe’s most hyped law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is now on the chopping block. Powerful forces within the European Commission, supported by the German government, hope that deregulation will boost Europe’s tech sector, particularly AI. This is a grave mistake.
China’s DeepSeek, which has stunned the AI world over the past year, emerged under a legal regime far stricter than Europe’s. China’s rigorous pre-deployment rules appear to have done its world-beating AI innovation no harm.
Europe’s problem is not that it has too many rules for AI, but that it hypes those rules and then neglects to enforce them. This is why Google, Meta, Microsoft et al dominate Europe’s market. Documents revealed in a US court show a vast free-for-all of data inside Meta: it uses information that people give it for one service, such as social media, to prop up unrelated parts of its business, including its most invasive ad targeting. This allows Meta, and other similar companies, to build cascading monopolies that dominate sector after sector.
Meta’s data free-for-all violates GDPR’s commonsense “purpose limitation principle”: when you hand over data for one purpose, it cannot automatically be used for some other unrelated purpose. Enforcing just this one GDPR principle would effectively break up every giant US tech firm. The GDPR has many other principles that also have the power to upend these firms’ operations. Yet chronic under-enforcement in Europe has allowed them to entrench their domination, leaving no space in the market for European innovators to scale up their offerings.
Instead of correcting this strategic mistake, the commission plans to water down GDPR. One proposed change would allow companies to claim that their AI training data is legal, freed from the GDPR’s more rigorous requirements to prove it. This permissiveness would allow Google, Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft to legitimise years of ill-gotten data gains, and make it utterly impossible for European competitors to catch up. Instead, the US firms should be forced to comply with the law as it is written.
Another proposed change would weaken the protection of people’s most intimate data. Because social media algorithms rely on such “special category” data, but use them improperly, this change would leave children across Europe more exposed to the dangerous algorithms of TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, which can push self-hate, self-harm and suicide in to their feeds. Again, enforcement rather than deregulation is the answer.
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