LISBON — Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission should continue to enforce its digital rules with an iron fist despite the outcry from U.S. officials and big tech moguls, co-chair of the Greens in the European Parliament Bas Eickhout told POLITICO. As Green politicians from across Europe gather in the Portuguese capital for their annual congress, U.S. top officials are blasting the EU for imposing a penalty on social media platform X for breaching its transparency obligations under the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc’s content moderation rule book. “They should just implement the law, which means they need to be tougher,” Eickhout told POLITICO on the sidelines of the event. He argued that the fine of €120 million is “nothing” for billionaire Elon Musk and that the EU executive should go further. The Commission needs to “make clear that we should be proud of our policies … we are the only ones fighting American Big Tech,” he said, adding that tech companies are “killing freedom of speech in Europe.” The Greens have in the past denounced Meta and X over their content moderation policies, arguing these platforms amplify “disinformation” and “extremism” and interfere in European electoral processes. Meta and X did not reply to a request for comment by the time of publication. Meta has “introduced changes to our content reporting options, appeals process and data access tools since the DSA came into force and are confident that these solutions match what is required under the law in the EU,” a Meta spokesperson said at the end of October. Tech mogul Musk said his response to the penalty would target the EU officials who imposed it. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the fine is “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments,” and accused the move of “censorship.” “It’s not good when our former allies in Washington are now working hand in glove with Big Tech,” blasted European Green Party chair Ciarán Cuffe at the opening of the congress in Lisbon. Eickhout, whose party GreenLeft-Labor alliance is in negotiations to enter government in the Netherlands, said “we should pick on this battle and stand strong.” The Commission’s decision to fine X under the EU’s Digital Services Act is over transparency concerns. The Commission said the design of X’s blue checkmark is “deceptive,” after it was changed from user verification into a paid feature. The EU’s executive also said X’s advertising library lacks transparency and that it fails to provide access to public data for researchers as required by the law.  Eickhout lamented that European governments are slow in condemning the U.S. moves against the EU, and argued that with its recent national security strategy, the Americans have made clear their objective is to divide Europe from within by fueling far-right parties. “Some of the leaders like [French President Emmanuel] Macron are still desperately trying to say that that the United States are our ally,” Eickhout said. “I want to see urgency on how Europe is going to take its own path and not rely on the U.S. anymore, because it’s clear we cannot.”

Steven Everts is the director of the EU Institute for Security Studies The intense diplomatic maneuvering to shape an endgame to the war in Ukraine has revealed a troubling reality: Even when it comes to its own security, the EU struggles to be a central player. The ongoing negotiations over Ukraine’s future — a conflict European leaders routinely describe as “existential” — are proceeding with minimal input from the bloc. And while others set the tone and direction, Europe remains reactive: managing the fallout, limiting the damage and hoping to recuperate its influence. This marginalization isn’t the result of a single decision or down to one person — no matter how consequential U.S. President Donald Trump may be. Rather, it reflects a deeper vulnerability and an unsettling pattern. Anyone looking at Europe’s choices in recent months can see a psychology of weakness. It paints the picture of a continent lacking courage, unable to take decisive action even when it comes to its core interests and when policy alternatives are within reach. Europe is losing confidence, sinking into fatalism and justifying its passivity with the soothing thought that it has no real choice, as its cards are weak. Besides, in the long run, things will work out. Just wait for the U.S. midterms. But will they? And can Europe afford to wait? Ukraine certainly cannot. Simply commenting on others’ peace plan drafts in some form of “track-changes diplomacy” isn’t enough. Decisions are needed, and they’re needed now. Europe is a continent of rich countries with ample capabilities. But while its leaders insist Ukraine’s security and success are essential to Europe’s own security and survival, its actual military assistance to Kyiv has declined in recent months. On the financial end, Europe is flunking the test it set for itself. Ukraine requires approximately €70 billion annually — and yes, this is a large sum, but it amounts to only 0.35 percent of the EU’s GDP. This is within Europe’s collective capacity. Yet for months now, member countries have been unable to agree on the mechanisms for using frozen Russian assets or suitable alternatives that could keep Ukraine afloat. Instead, we’ve seen dithering and the triumph of small thinking. It’s also rather telling that the U.S. attempt to simply impose how these assets are to be used, with 50 percent of the profits going to Washington instead of Kyiv, is finally jolting Europe into action. Regrettably, Europe’s psychology of weakness is equally visible in the economic domain, as the EU-U.S. trade agreement struck this July was a classic case of how frailty can masquerade as “pragmatism.” Brussels had the tools to respond to Washington’s tariffs and coercive measures, including counter-tariffs and its anti-coercion instrument. But under pressure from member countries fearful of broader U.S. disengagement from European security and Ukraine, it chose not to use them. The result was a one-sided “deal” with a 15 percent unilateral tariff, which breaks the World Trade Organization’s rules and obliges Europe to make energy purchases and investments in the U.S. worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Even worse, the deal didn’t produce the stability advertised as its main benefit. Washington has since designated Europe’s energy transition measures and tech regulations as “trade barriers” and “taxes on U.S. companies,” signaling that further retaliatory steps may follow. Just last week, the U.S. upped the pressure once more, when its trade representatives met EU ministers and openly challenged existing EU rules on tech. Regrettably, Europe’s psychology of weakness is equally visible in the economic domain, as the EU-U.S. trade agreement struck this July was a classic case of how frailty can masquerade as “pragmatism.”. | Thierry Monasse/Getty Images More than on defense, the EU is meant to be an economic and regulatory superpower. But despite decades of leveraging its economic weight for political purposes, the EU is now adrift, faced with a widening transatlantic power play over trade and technology. Similar patterns of retreat mark the EU’s actions in other areas as well. As Russia escalates its hybrid warfare operations against the bloc’s critical infrastructure, Europe’s response remains hesitant. As China dramatically weaponizes its export controls on critical mineral exports, Europe continues to respond late and without clear coordination. And in the Middle East, despite being one of the leading donors to Gaza, Europe is peripheral in shaping any ceasefire and reconstruction plans. In crisis after crisis, Europe’s role is not only small but shrinking still. The question is, when will Europeans decide they’ve had enough of this weakness and irrelevance? This is, above all, a matter of psychology, of believing in one’s capabilities, including the capacity to say “no.” But this is only possible if Europe invests in its ability to take major decisions together — through joint political authority and financial resources. There is no way out of this without investing in a stronger EU. This basic argument has been made a hundred times before. But while insisting on “more political will” among member countries is, indeed, right, it’s also too simplistic. We have to acknowledge that building a stronger EU also means having to give somethings up. But in return we will gain something essential: The ability to stand firm in a world of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. This is both necessary and priceless.

BRUSSELS — Global finance regulators’ failure to impose sufficient rules on cryptocurrency could threaten the world’s financial stability, global risk body the Financial Stability Board has warned. Reviewing the rollout of a global framework for crypto rules, the FSB said there are “significant gaps and inconsistencies” in implementing the rules, which could “pose risks to financial stability and to the development of a resilient digital asset ecosystem.” On the regulation of stablecoins, which are virtual currencies pegged to real-world assets, the FSB said regulation is “lagging.” Because of the international, decentralized nature of financial technologies like crypto, having gaps in global rules is an issue as providers can go wherever the rules are the most lax, which “complicates oversight,” the review said. It added that global cooperation on regulating the currencies is “fragmented, inconsistent, and insufficient” to address their global nature. The FSB also flagged gaps in oversight of crypto service providers, saying supervision of “potentially higher risk activities, such as borrowing, lending, and margin trading, is often lacking” and enforcement can “lag behind regulatory development.” The review recommended that governments implement the global crypto framework fully. It also said they should “conduct an assessment of the scale and nature of cross-border crypto-asset activities into and out of their jurisdictions” at the “appropriate time.” Earlier this week, FSB chair Andrew Bailey warned G20 finance ministers and central bank governors that stablecoins are a potential area of vulnerability for the financial system.

Robert Benson is the associate director for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress. History will likely remember the U.S.–EU Turnberry trade deal less for its technicalities than for what it symbolizes: the moment Washington openly rewrote the transatlantic bargain. Far from a victory for Brussels, this terse 19-point deal merely codified the structural disadvantages the bloc faced in earlier trade talks. Building on the understanding reached at U.S. President Trump’s Turnberry golf resort in July — which European leaders had called “a dark day” — the agreement imposed a 15 percent tariff on most European exports to the U.S. and formalizes a commitment to bring auto tariffs to the same level, while leaving the levies on Europe’s car industry punishingly high. Yet, somehow, the release of the deal’s framework text was met with grudging acceptance — and even relief — on the grounds that it was the best bargain Europe could hope for. Essentially, what began as a trade standoff ended in a lopsided pact formalizing America’s leverage over Europe. Then, before the ink had even dried, Washington drew a new battle line, threatening fresh tariffs that would strike at the core of the bloc’s digital sovereignty. This broadside exposes a deeper truth: Europe is adrift in a world where it no longer shapes the norm and stands increasingly vulnerable to American revisionism. This realization may be frightening, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had already laid out this vision last fall — that the U.S. must leverage Europe’s security dependence to rewrite the global economic order in its favor. Turnberry is simply the first full implementation of this strategy, and pressure will only mount from here. The deal itself is structurally skewed, front-loading a 15-percent asymmetric tariff in favor of U.S. industries and shielding American sectors from reciprocal obligations. Its bold promises — including $750 billion in U.S. energy exports and $600 billion in EU investment — are also unrealistic and deliberately designed to collapse under their own weight. So, when the EU inevitably falls short, the U.S. can then seize the opportunity to press for greater concessions on tech regulation and digital services. The real purpose isn’t compliance, it’s coercion. And while the fact that we’ve so far managed to avoid a full-blown trade war may appear to some as evidence of successful diplomacy, this reading overlooks the real cost of Brussels’s concessions: sharp economic contraction, political backlash and the normalization of bullying in international diplomacy. Europe is navigating a maze of interdependencies, and Washington knows exactly how to exploit that. As evidenced by Congressman Jim Jordan’s August visits to Brussels, London and Dublin, MAGA will now frame the EU’s digital regulation — on content moderation, data privacy and platform accountability — as violations of “free speech” and anti-American bias. This is more than a rhetorical ploy, it’s a calculated effort to destabilize Europe’s liberal democracies by amplifying fringe political actors, sowing division and undermining trust in centrist institutions. Beyond pushing back against tech standards, Washington is positioning itself to challenge Europe on the ideological legitimacy of its entire regulatory model. Thus, the battle over digital sovereignty will be cast in civilizational terms — free markets versus bureaucratic overreach, expression versus censorship, sovereignty versus globalism. And Europe’s far-right narrative of elite censorship will have the imprimatur of U.S. policy. These grievances will then likely merge with U.S. demands for greater burden-sharing on defense or security concessions on Ukraine. It’s also entirely possible the Trump administration will exploit divisions among member countries on digital sovereignty, tying reviews of America’s force posture to regulatory rollbacks, a retreat on digital taxes or alignment with its own tech standards.  Brussels needs to be prepared for the battles ahead. Thankfully, some of the consequences are already coming into focus: First, driven by anemic growth forecasts of 0.5 to 0.9 percent — particularly in export-heavy economies like Germany — the risk of a far-right surge across Europe is growing. This economic pain will translate into political volatility. Populist parties will frame Brussels as complicit in Washington’s coercion and incapable of defending national interests. And despite its ideological affinities with the U.S., Europe’s far right won’t have any qualms with turning on its ideological bedfellows in the White House. Germany’s Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally are already exploiting anger over the deal and are calling for a loosening of transatlantic ties.   Brussels needs to be prepared for the battles ahead. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images Next, when it comes to security, the U.S.–EU decoupling that’s already in motion will only accelerate. France and Germany are currently reviving proposals for a European Security Council, accelerating cooperation under Permanent Structured Cooperation and weighing investment in a European Defense Fund. Public opinion is shifting too. Majorities in Germany and France now support greater autonomy in defense planning and procurement, with pluralities favoring a European army. Even staunchly Atlanticist Poland is moving away from reflexive alignment with Washington. Finally, there’s the fact that, sooner or later, markets will wake up to the implications of this global reordering. So far, they’ve largely shrugged it off, treating Turnberry as theater, and investors have priced in volatility without grasping the deeper structural shift underway. But if capital flows start reflecting the risk of permanent transatlantic divergence — on currency regimes, regulatory frameworks and trade access — the spiral could be swift. And unlike the 2008 financial crisis, the shock wouldn’t be easily sutured. Europe isn’t powerless here. It retains economic scale, regulatory clout and unused tools — but it must be prepared to use them. This means treating economic security like national security, and embedding defense autonomy, energy resilience and technological sovereignty into a unified strategic doctrine. It also means strengthening Europe’s defenses against asymmetric coercion. Brussels’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, a trade tool meant to counter economic blackmail by imposing targeted measures on U.S. service providers, was a step in the right direction — even if it ultimately wasn’t deployed. Now, the EU must also build legal firewalls against extraterritorial enforcement and deploy its regulatory power to actively shape global norms. Europe’s challenge isn’t to restore the old transatlantic bargain but to build a new one before the next crisis hits and Trump dictates the terms once more. If the bloc hesitates, it won’t get to choose at all.

The European Commission has launched a review of its digital competition rules for Big Tech and is seeking views on how the regulation has worked to date and whether it needs to be reformed. The Digital Markets Act fully came into effect in the Spring of 2024 and includes a list of do’s and don’ts for the six Big Tech companies that fall under its scope: Meta, Google, Alphabet, Apple, ByteDance and Amazon. The law, which is intended to ensure competition within a tech sector dominated by global giants, has become heavily politicized in recent months, with the U.S. administration accusing the EU of unfairly targeting American companies and classing it as a non-tariff trade barrier in U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war. The EU executive is asking the public to give their views on whether the DMA has met its core objectives to inject fairness and contestability into digital markets, as well as its real-world impact. The Commission is obliged to review the regulation by mid-2026. Interested parties are also asked to give feedback on whether the Commission should modify its list of prescriptions and prohibitions, or the list of core platform services covered by the DMA.  Senior members of the European Parliament have called on their Commission to designate AI chatbots and cloud services under the DMA. The Commission is giving interested parties until September 24 to tell the Commission what they think of the regulation.

PARIS — France’s President Emmanuel Macron is set on banning kids from social media.   All that stands in his way are legal fights, glitchy tech, a powerful lobby of Big Tech and Big Porn — and kids being kids.  Macron said late Tuesday that France “can’t wait” any longer in banning social media for children under 15, in response to the fatal stabbing of a teaching assistant at a high school in the suburbs of Paris. The stabbing came one month after a teenager killed a student in a similar incident at a high school in Nantes.   The incidents have determined the French government to keep kids away from what it considers harmful content, and has made France the epicenter of a fierce debate across Europe and the West over imposing limits on social media and smartphone use to better protect children online.  In the past year, Macron’s government has pushed to bar smartphones from schools and to limit screen use in nurseries. It has even gone head to head with the world’s biggest porn platforms, forcing them to verify their users’ age — a high-stakes move that prompted the owner of Pornhub, Redtube and YouPorn to stop serving porn in France earlier this month.   But the French crusade has also put Paris on a collision course with Brussels regulators, privacy rights groups and social media platforms.   Here’s what stands in the way of Macron and a French ban on social media for kids:   1. PARIS IS HEADED FOR A CLASH WITH BRUSSELS Paris insists it really wants an EU-wide regime, and Macron himself has said that banning kids would be a “European competence.”  “I’m giving us a few months to achieve European mobilization. Otherwise, I will negotiate with the Europeans so that we can do it ourselves in France,” the French president said Tuesday.  The government has launched a campaign to pressure other European countries to follow its example, with digital minister Clara Chappaz taking the lead.  “France cannot play it solo because member states have lost most of their competences” on regulating social media platforms, said Thibault Douville, a professor of French digital law.  In Brussels, though, European Union officials aren’t warming to the idea of an all-out ban for kids.   The Commission is readying its own measures on age verification, including guidelines and an app, but a social media ban is not foreseen. | STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images “Let’s be clear … [a] wide social media ban is not what the European Commission is doing. It’s not where we are heading to. Why? Because this is the prerogative of our member states,” Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters Wednesday.  Minors protection online is covered by the Digital Services Act, an EU-wide regulation that gives supervisory powers over Very Large Online Platforms such as major social media to the European Commission.   The Commission is readying its own measures on age verification, including guidelines and an app, but a social media ban is not foreseen.   EU countries can set a digital age of majority under the EU’s landmark privacy rules, the General Data Protection Regulation, Regnier said. “Of course, member states can go for that option.”   Under Article 8 of the GDPR, EU countries can set a minimum user age for platforms to process their data, provided it is over 13. But data can still be processed if parents give their consent, the law says.  On paper, this GDPR article bars minors under that age from accessing social media, but it leaves it up to the platforms to decide how to comply with this “digital majority.”  Ultimately, the Commission may have to challenge any French law imposing a ban — depending on its shape — which could lead to a long legal tussle.  2. WATCHDOGS WARN OF SURVEILLANCE  To block kids from porn sites, France passed measures requiring that platforms verify age online using a double-blind method: where an independent age checker knows the person’s details, but not what platform they want to visit.   That has won the approval of the country’s CNIL data protection regulator, which found it protected privacy sufficiently.  But the privacy watchdog has stressed that age checks on the internet should only happen in specific contexts, such as when there are risks to minors.    If age verification creeps into more general use it could “lead to the establishment of a closed digital world, in which individuals would have to constantly prove their age, or even their identity, leading to significant risks to their rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression,” the regulator has warned.    Andy Yen, the chief executive officer of privacy technology company Proton, told POLITICO that “we’re really not debating age verification for children, we’re debating whether it makes sense to do age verification for everyone. And if you do age verification on everyone, there are definitely privacy and security considerations that come as a result of that.”   Within half an hour of the suspension, ProtonVPN saw registrations increase by 1,000 percent, the VPN service said in a post on X. | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images Trying to gauge someone’s age by profiling their activities online or using AI to estimate it from a selfie involves gathering huge amounts of information, said Urs Buscke, senior legal officer with European consumer organization BEUC. He said this conflicted with the GDPR’s key principle of data minimization, where data is only collected if it is strictly necessary. 3. THE TECH SECTOR ISN’T QUITE READY YET  For regulators and tech firms alike, enforcing a social media ban for kids is a nightmare.  Despite legal protections, almost half of children under 10 have social media accounts in Denmark, the country’s digital minister Caroline Stage Olsen said last week.  “There is no data” to suggest that these sorts of bans are effective, said Jessica Piotrowski, chair of the University of Amsterdam’s School of Communication Research and an adviser to YouTube on the issue of minors protection.   Instead, there is “some data that actually suggests, when you try to ban, it can actually do them harm, because [minors] find other ways instead,” Piotrowski said. To make matters worse, Big Tech firms have clashed heavily over who should be responsible for checking the ages of internet users.   On the one side, Meta as well as porn platforms and others claim it should be up to companies running operating systems — most notably Apple, through its mobile system iOS, and Google through Android.   On the other, the owners of operating systems say the social media apps themselves have a responsibility to stop harmful content from reaching minors.   Some technologies used to check the age of internet users are having growing pains as well. Research out this month claimed that Yoti, a leading age verification app that counts Meta among its customers, is “extensively tracking users without consent” and was operating with chinks in its cyber armor that “potentially could be manipulated by third parties.”   In response, Yoti said it had passed the information on to be investigated, but added that researchers had drawn “certain conclusions and extrapolations that are incorrect and potentially harmful to public confidence in a technology built with the intention of promoting and supporting online safety.”  The European Commission, meanwhile, is developing its own age verification app, but it remains in the testing phase in countries like Denmark, Italy, France, Greece and Spain. 4. KIDS WILL FIND A WAY The clearest data point showing that Paris faces an uphill battle came in the hours and days after porn platforms stopped serving adult content in France.   Virtual private networks, which allow internet users to bypass geographic restrictions, saw a surge in demand after Aylo Freesites, the parent company of Pornhub, Redtube and YouPorn, suspended the sites for French users this month.  Within half an hour of the suspension, ProtonVPN saw registrations increase by 1,000 percent, the VPN service said in a post on X. Demand for VPNs overall increased by 334 percent on June 4 compared to the average of the 28 previous days, ranking site Top10VPN said.  Whatever Macron’s plans, you can count on kids to figure out any and all possible ways to thwart them.  Eliza Gkritsi and Ellen O’Regan reported from Brussels. Émile Marzolf and Klara Durand reported from Paris. Pieter Haeck contributed reporting from Brussels. 

In a stern intervention, a judge at the High Court of England and Wales issued a formal warning to legal professionals on Friday, declaring that lawyers who submit fictitious cases generated by artificial intelligence could face criminal charges. The senior judge scolded lawyers in two cases who apparently used AI tools when preparing written arguments that were presented in court. “There are serious implications for the administration of justice and public confidence in the justice system if artificial intelligence is misused,” Victoria Sharp, president of the King’s Bench Division of the High Court, said in the judgment delivered on Friday. In the judgment, Sharp also referred to “concerns about the competence and conduct of the individual lawyers who have been referred to this court,” and concluded that all previous guidance seems to be “insufficient to address the misuse of artificial intelligence.” The lawyer denied using AI but admitted that she might have inadvertently done so while researching on the internet in preparation for her case. The ruling comes after so-called hallucinations — AI-generated fictions — have cropped up at big law firms since AI programs such as ChatGPT have become widely available.

Eoin Drea is senior research officer at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies. For all its trade threats and flips-flops on tariffs, Washington actually has a very consistent policy when it comes to U.S. tech companies — it wants to ensure their global dominance. And it’s got a “friend” in the EU to help with that. For the White House, the bloc’s recently imposed fines on giants Meta and Apple are a “novel form of economic extortion,” which are designed to escalate transatlantic trade tensions and impose even more “non-trade tariffs” on U.S. companies. But despite the EU’s intent to redline the defense of its crowning legislative jewel — the Digital Markets Act (DMA) — the more depressing political reality is that the bloc is not united on tech regulation. The European Commission might earnestly believe its digital rules are a paradigm of virtue, with President Ursula von der Leyen stating: “We don’t care where a company’s from and who’s running it.” But member countries can’t even agree to threaten U.S. tech firms with additional taxes in any possible trade war. And this time, it’s not Germany or even Hungary’s perennially obstructive Prime Minister Viktor Orbán that’s the problem — it’s Ireland. For over two decades now, Ireland has been colluding with U.S. tech companies in a pairing deliberately designed to weaken EU tech rules. It may be a small member country, but Ireland’s dependence on U.S. tech and pharmaceutical companies beggars belief. The country is home to the European headquarters of techies from Meta to Microsoft and everything in between. Meanwhile, Dublin has its very own “Silicon Docks” and direct flights to over 20 U.S. destinations. Such is the scale of travel, Ireland remains the only location in Europe with U.S. immigration and customs preclearance at its airports. Forget Greenland, Ireland is the North Atlantic island the U.S. already owns. And when it comes to tech, Dublin is Trump’s Trojan horse. As it stands, about 15 percent of the Irish workforce — that’s about 400,000 people — work directly, or indirectly, for U.S. companies. Nearly 30 percent of Ireland’s total tax revenue in 2023 came from corporate taxes — compared to just 6 percent in Germany and France — which are overwhelmingly sourced from U.S. tech and pharma companies. As noted by the independent Irish Fiscal Council, without these bumper tax receipts, Ireland would have run a significant budget deficit every year since Dublin last went bankrupt in 2010. (And no, these figures don’t even include the additional €13 billion the European Court of Justice forced Ireland to accept from Apple in a 2024 judgement.) It’s no wonder then that the Irish prime minister recently appealed for Europe’s response to Washington to be “considered and measured and the action should be proportionate.” Ireland’s subsequent vow to “resist” EU digital taxes is, in fact, driven by a blind panic arising from its financial dependence on U.S. companies, as well as the reality of its long history of seeking to promote U.S. interests over European ones. When it comes to tech, Dublin is Donald Trump’s Trojan horse. | Lo Scalzo/EPA Ireland is stuck in a two-decade-long scandal of its own making: It deliberately collaborated with U.S. tech companies to falsely “build up the credibility” of the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), with the unsuccessful goal of deflecting concern from other EU members as to its impartiality in policing European laws. It has come to the point where Ireland’s so bad at policing the EU’s data protection regulations that the IDPC is constantly overruled by other national data protection agencies, as well as the Pan-European Data Protection Board. It’s no wonder these companies describe Ireland as a “lapdog” — or that Brussels has zero faith in Dublin’s professions of Europeanness. If Brussels is serious about maintaining the integrity of its tech rules, it needs to focus less on Washington and more on shifting regulation away from Dublin. It’s clear that Ireland will never become a credible regulator of U.S. tech companies in Europe — its political proximity to Silicon Valley and its economic dependency render this impossible. In fact, Ireland’s reliance on the U.S. makes it ideal for a White House intent on weaponizing tech and social media companies as part of wider trade and cultural battles. Rather, the EU needs a centralized agency to police all European tech laws, including the DMA and the General Data Protection Regulation. It needs a body to regulate large tech companies operating in the EU on a Pan-European level, an EU institution that removes national bias from decisions of European importance. Such a move would liberate Dublin from the opposing pressures of Brussels and Washington, as well as ensure no other EU member country could potentially replicate its light-touch regulatory regime.  Even any future moves Trump might make to undermine Ireland’s attractiveness to U.S. multinationals should be welcomed in Dublin, as it would result in a lower yet more sustainable growth path for the Emerald Isle, which finds itself beset by a housing shortage, creaking public services and inadequate physical infrastructure. It would also — without a doubt — increase its credibility on the EU stage. But make no mistake — the vast majority of existing U.S. investment in Ireland isn’t going anywhere soon. As the de facto 51st state, Ireland is embedded in U.S. supply chains in a way that extends well beyond individual presidents and ideologies. And luckily for Europe, there’s an existing model it can follow. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the supervision of over 100 of the largest banks operating within the EU was moved from national regulators to the European Central Bank. The result? Notwithstanding Brexit, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and Trump 2.0, Europe’s financial sector is now stable, profitable and viewed by global investors as a safe haven. Now, it’s time to apply that model to tech. It’s time for Ireland to pick a side. And it’s time for Brussels to force them.

BRUSSELS — Europe’s most famous technology law, the GDPR, is next on the hit list as the European Union pushes ahead with its regulatory killing spree to slash laws it reckons are weighing down its businesses. The European Commission plans to present a proposal to cut back the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR for short, in the next couple of weeks. Slashing regulation is a key focus for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, as part of an attempt to make businesses in Europe more competitive with rivals in the United States, China and elsewhere.  The EU’s executive arm has already unveiled packages to simplify rules around sustainability reporting and accessing EU investment. The aim is for companies to waste less time and money on complying with complex legal and regulatory requirements imposed by EU laws. The GDPR is seen as one of Europe’s most complex pieces of legislation by the technology sector — and by businesses far and wide beyond tech — for how it forces companies doing business in Europe to manage their data and to handle the requests and rights of data subjects to that personal data. Its introduction in 2018 drew a deluge of desperate emails from firms asking for people’s consent to use their data. Seven years later, Brussels is taking out the scissors to give its (in)famous privacy law a trim. There are “a lot of good things about GDPR, [and] privacy is completely necessary. But we don’t need to regulate in a stupid way. We need to make it easy for businesses and for companies to comply,” Danish Digital Minister Caroline Stage Olsen told reporters last week. Denmark will chair the work in the EU Council in the second half of 2025 as part of its rotating presidency. The criticism of the GDPR echoes the views of former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who released a landmark economic report last September warning that Europe’s complex laws were preventing its economy from catching up with the United States and China. “The EU’s regulatory stance towards tech companies hampers innovation,” Draghi wrote, singling out the Artificial Intelligence Act and the GDPR. For small and cash-strapped businesses, the reams of documentation the GDPR asks companies to produce has long been a gripe. Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath said the key takeaway from a review of the GDPR last summer “is the need for greater support [for] businesses, especially SMEs, in their compliance efforts.”  McGrath confirmed last week that a proposal to simplify the GDPR is due in the “coming weeks.” The Commission had planned to agree on a so-called simplification package for small and medium-sized businesses on April 16, according to the Commission’s diary, but that date has since been bumped to May 21. A Commission official, granted anonymity to discuss ongoing planning, told POLITICO that the date is “only indicative” and that it has not been decided whether the GDPR will feature in the package — but that the proposal to simplify privacy rules will definitely be delivered “by June.” Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath said the key takeaway from a review of the GDPR last summer “is the need for greater support [for] businesses, especially SMEs, in their compliance efforts.” | Martin Bertrand/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images The Commission said previously that the simplification plan will focus on reporting requirements for organizations with less than 500 people, but will not touch the “underlying core objective of [the] GDPR regime.”  Adjustments could include limiting requirements to keep records of data processing activities, or reforming how businesses provide data protection impact statements — two rules seen as overly cumbersome to smaller firms. PANDORA’S BOX OF LOBBYING The GDPR was a landmark piece of legislation when it took effect in 2018 and has been heralded as an example of the Brussels Effect, having set an international standard for the protection of personal data.   Negotiations on the privacy law triggered one of the biggest lobbying efforts Brussels had ever seen. Tech companies beefed up their Brussels operations and poured millions into trying to influence the rules during the drafting process. The proposal drew over 3,000 amendments in the European Parliament — a record. The danger in the EU’s revising the law is that it could start a lobbying war between Big Tech companies and privacy advocates, two of the strongest public affairs forces in Brussels. Some fear that if the GDPR is called into question, the law could crumble under the lobbying pressure. “Reopening the GDPR for simplification is risky, no matter how well-intentioned and targeted the proposal may seem,” said Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal, policy advisor at digital rights group EDRi.   The EU is already finalizing a new law on the procedural rules for privacy regulators to coordinate on major GDPR cases. According to Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, the GDPR is still a “huge target” for lobbyists, but its core rules can’t easily be scrapped since the protection of personal data is enshrined in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights as an inalienable freedom.   “A Court of Justice would annul a GDPR that doesn’t have these core elements,” Schrems said. “So if it’s where [lobbyists] want to spend their energy, be my guest, but they’re not going to get there.”   Pieter Haeck contributed reporting.

The European Union’s social media law “does not regulate speech,” EU tech boss Henna Virkkunen told a key U.S. lawmaker who had criticized the bloc’s tech rules as censorship. A regulation that largely targets U.S. Big Tech firms, the Digital Services Act is now in the eye of a transatlantic trade row, with President Donald Trump threatening tariffs and U.S. officials blasting EU censorship, echoing earlier comments from Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. “The EU is deeply committed to protecting and promoting free speech online and offline,” Virkkunen said in a letter to United States House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan dated Feb. 18 and seen by POLITICO. “Many Europeans have living memories of censorship and persecution during the Cold War under communist regimes.” Virkkunen said the Digital Services Act (DSA) is “content-agnostic” and that Brussels and national regulators “have no power to moderate content or to impose any specific approach to moderation.” Rules defining unlawful speech or illegal content, such as child abuse material, are outlined in separate EU or national legislation. She argued, on the contrary, that the law “guarantees” free speech since platforms must be transparent about how they handle content. Jordan had pressed Virkkunen in January to address “serious concerns with how the DSA’s censorship provisions affect free speech in the United States.” He warned that the DSA, which only applies in the EU, “may limit or restrict Americans’ constitutionally protected speech in the United States.” But Virkkunen said the law cannot be used to press platforms to restrict lawful speech in the U.S. or elsewhere. “This is categorically not the case,” she said, adding that the DSA “applies exclusively within the European Union.” She went on to argue that the “real threats to free expression” lie elsewhere, in countries like Russia, Iran and China. Jordan has emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of the EU’s tech regulation, sending letters to both Virkkunen and competition chief Teresa Ribera about the DSA and the EU’s digital competition law, the Digital Markets Act. Ribera and Virkkunen also wrote separately to Jordan that the DMA “does not target U.S. companies,” POLITICO reported last week.