Memorandum to the new European Parliament: Use technology to your advantage

Anti-immigration, nationalist parties have gained seats in this weekend’s European Parliament elections. They need to avoid the temptation of digital protectionism.

Dear Members of the European Parliament,

Congratulations on your victory. As you prepare to move to Brussels, you will likely hear a chorus of warnings about the European Union’s declining competitiveness and digital policies. The continent’s GDP per capita is less than a quarter of that of the United States.

The underlying causes are many, but one stands out: economic strength is increasingly dependent on digital power, rather than Europe’s traditional industrial strength. Unfortunately, the European Parliament’s digital stance is ambivalent at best. Over-regulation has made new laws difficult to comply with, and it has dabbled in counterproductive digital sovereignty. Rather than a new regulatory offensive, Parliament needs to promote a regulatory moratorium, prioritize enforcement, and revive the faltering transatlantic digital alliance.

Let’s admit it: for most of you newcomers, technology and the transatlantic alliance are not priorities. Far-right parties targeted immigration, even though Europe’s demographic crisis necessitates an influx of immigrants. They won nearly a quarter of the seats, down from a fifth in 2019. Backlash against the EU’s ambitious climate regulation, the Green Deal, dealt a blow to the continent’s Green parties: they fell from 72 seats in the last parliament to an expected 52.

Technology was barely discussed during the election campaign. The mainstream center-right and center-left parties (which still came out on top) were the strongest advocates of digital regulation. Free-market, pro-tech liberals struggled, losing seats from 102 to 79. The center-right and center-left have made Big Tech their enemy, while the far-right has highlighted the threat from foreigners. Both types of populism are dangerous.

Throughout your term, Congress has been receptive to regulating technology. That’s understandable. Until you acted, technology had become a critical driver of the modern economy yet was largely unregulated. While the internet democratized access to information, it also spawned a nasty mix of disinformation, bullying, and illegal content, from counterfeit goods to hate speech. Big tech companies have perhaps gotten too big.

In response, the European Union has passed a flurry of new regulations: The General Data Protection Regulation set a gold standard for privacy protection; the Digital Services Act increased the responsibility of internet platforms to fight illegal content; and the Digital Markets Act seeks to rein in “gatekeepers” who block access to digital markets. The full list of new regulations is staggering. In contrast, the United States has yet to reach agreement on a single major piece of tech-related legislation.

While there is broad political consensus in Europe about the need to ring-fence technology, your predecessors in parliament often approved unrealistic measures. In the EU, the European Commission proposes legislation and you review and amend it. Parliament often proposed unrealistic amendments designed to score political points rather than to enable effective implementation.

A good example is messaging interoperability. When discussing the Digital Markets Bill, lawmakers floated the idea of ​​forcing Meta’s WhatsApp to be “interoperable” with other messaging services such as Signal. But no one had any idea how such interoperability would actually work. Both Commission officials and messaging services have struggled to implement this requirement, and so far, to my knowledge, no competing messaging service has chosen to exchange messages with WhatsApp.

The next Congress’ priority should be to enforce existing regulations, not to invent new ones. Europe regulates. It struggles to enforce. Congress has no enforcement powers, but it can encourage regulators at the European Commission to define the many contradictions and ambiguities in the new law.

A polarised Parliament could make it harder to pass EU legislation on issues ranging from climate and immigration to industrial strategy and defence. For the tech industry, this moratorium on regulation could be productive. It can and should block the European Commission from pursuing additional rules, such as plans for a new “digital fairness” package. The Digital Services Act already covers most of these concerns. It can and should continue to block the overuse of digital surveillance by national governments, mostly on the right.

Above all, Parliament should push back against fallacies about digital sovereignty. Yes, Europe needs to build up its technological capabilities, but it shouldn’t reject US and Asian innovation. Europe’s adoption of cloud computing is already slow, and forcing governments to use European cloud providers will only slow it down further.

The new Parliament should promote transatlantic connectivity while opposing counterproductive protectionism. The main vehicle for technology cooperation is the Trade and Technology Council. This council has stalled. Currently, it only connects executive branches, the Biden administration and the European Commission. The council should be expanded to include dialogue between the European Parliament and the US Congress.

This dialogue will not be smooth. Many of you are nationalists who are skeptical of American power. Some of you in far-right and far-left European parties have close ties with Russia and China. Political turmoil in the United States is sure to intensify as we approach the presidential election in November. The new Trump administration will be hostile to traditional European allies. Even President Joseph Biden, who is friendly to Europe, has incurred the ire of Europe with his protectionist policies.

The next few years will undoubtedly be turbulent, but Europe must demonstrate that its interests require it to embrace America and its technology, not reject it.

Bill Echikson is a nonresident senior fellow at CEPA and editor of Bandwidth.

Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to promoting transatlantic cooperation on technology policy. All opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or of the Centre for European Policy Analysis.