Tech regulation raises some of the thorniest questions of our time — about free speech versus hate speech, copyright versus fair use, truth versus manipulation. Yet these debates are increasingly irrelevant unless states can first establish digital sovereignty. Without the will to enforce laws on multinational corporations, “tech regulation” is a dead letter.
Both the EU and the Commonwealth countries have been trying to use regulation to chart a third path between the “laissez faire” of the US and the explicit state control of authoritarian regimes like China. But the shakedowns occasioned by Trump’s unilateral “reciprocal” tariffs demonstrates the pointlessness of these laws without the will to enforce them.
The Canadians were forced to give up a Digital Services Tax. Earlier and somehow still ongoing negotiations with the UK involve a similar tax. EU negotiations may hinge on the enforcement of the Digital Markets Act. In all cases, trade with the US increasingly requires the trading partner to cede their digital sovereignty. The federal US government even tried to impose this standard on states, with a clause banning them from regulating AI in Trump’s recent omnibus bill. The removal of the clause seems to have been driven by pushback from Republican state governors.
There is growing evidence of an outright alliance between Big Tech and the American federal government. The connection between the millions donated by tech titans to Trump’s inauguration and the current tariff favoritism might seem like a standard instance of protectionist lobbying. “Laiseez faire” is a myth; this is crony capitalism. But what makes this case unique is the ability of these tech companies to directly influence political outcomes, both domestically and abroad.
Foreign tech regulation seeks to limit this influence (or at least to skim a bit off the top), but the US state appears to be following China’s lead in attempting to wield platform influence. The digital sword of Damocles hangs over every democratic election; as long as the California-ideological veneer of free speech lasted, we could be deluded into thinking that social media was a value-neutral vector of communication. The explicit rightward turn towards state power by Silicon Valley makes this illusion untenable. Tech companies should be considered as part of the military-industrial complex — not just Palantir, but all of the consumer-facing ones as well.
The plan to roll out American power through the internet began in the 90s, in what I have called the Palo Alto Consensus. Ideologically, the internet seemed to be the antidote to authoritarianism, and the democracy-spreading mission of neoliberalism sought to make the internet economically essential and thus to undermine the information control sustaining authoritarian regimes. As the internet developed, it became clear that “free speech” means something very different online, and that we have largely replaced the information control of governments with that of platforms. The latter control is far subtler, less totalitarian — but still sufficient to cripple democratic institutions.
The American state has embraced the use of hard power against allies in a way that once seemed unthinkable. It is no longer possible to ignore the risk of anti-democratic action by American Big Tech as part of state-aligned business strategy. Many observers are rightly leery of the proliferation of Huawei hardware and Bytedance software as a potential vector for state influence; we should think of OpenAI, Meta and Google in the same way. X, a clown car hijacked by a madman, should be straightforwardly banned while there appears to be some daylight between Musk and Trump. Instead, the FT recently reported that “the European Commission has stalled one of its investigations into Elon Musk’s X for breaking the bloc’s digital transparency rules, while it seeks to conclude trade talks with the US.”
Perhaps these countries will emerge from “Liberation Day” with their digital sovereignty intact; enforcement of existing tech regulation must be strengthened if so. But the longer term solution will require the development of domestic platforms that will be more amenable to democratic oversight. Europe must now do for its digital future what it began doing for its environmental one: build local capacity, enforce its rules, and cultivate the collective awareness that the status quo is intolerable.
{ 12 comments }
John Q 07.30.25 at 7:31 pm
Breaking with US platforms is crucial, but will be very slow and difficult. I wrote something about this for Australia
https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/the-need-for-digital-sovereignty
Kevin 07.30.25 at 8:07 pm
I’m a little skeptical of the argument that “digital sovereignty” is needed to prevent state intrusion on our ability to use tech coming in the same essay as “we should ban X” and worry about the proliferation of, essentially, every leading tech company in the world.
One reason the internet was seen as an incredible new technology is because governments, holding a monopoly on force, censor. If you don’t want to give your name and ID to use some service, but they request it, you don’t have to. If the UK government requires it for all services, you have no choice. If you don’t like how Twitter moderates content, don’t read it. If you don’t like how the French government moderates it, you are out of luck. If your 15 year old kid wants to watch a video about how to build a solar driven car, she can use the service she prefers, except, apparently, in Australia. If I want to post a link to a New York Times article, I can, except in Canada, where I am charged for the privilege of doing so.
The Huawei situation is a proven active effort to put backdoors in the communications infrastructure of the world which can be shut off in case of war, at the discretion of a nondemocratic entity that has an active plan for Taiwan and which has just used this technology to massively limit freedom in Hong Kong. The Twitter situation is “I don’t like how they moderate third-party posts”.
Alex SL 07.30.25 at 10:10 pm
Kevin,
Part of the post as I understand it is precisely that you cannot just switch away from big tech. Because of quasi-monopolies and network effects, that is effectively impossible in most cases.
Don’t like iOS and Android? Tough luck, those are the only two realistic options, great competitive market we have there. Don’t like how LLMs are forced into everything, be it email or meeting software, regardless of whether the customers want it? Good luck trying to find a product without them. Don’t like Twitter now that Musk has taken over? Okay, lose the entire following that you have built up over several years and who need to see your alert messages. Don’t like what Microsoft does with your data and how much they charge? Sucks to be you, your employer uses Microsoft Office, Teams, and Azure as the only options supported by the IT department, and for the company to ever change that arrangement would be so disruptive as to be up there in “if you don’t like it here, move to another country” territory, so management will have to fire staff to afford the next subscription price hike.
And, yes, if you are in Australia, what the Australian government decides on internet access applies to you. But here is the thing: you can vote that government out. You can never vote Zuckerberg out even if your business would be dead in the water without its Facebook profile. Countries can be democracies. Large corporations are always dictatorships.
nicopap 08.03.25 at 10:43 am
What keeps big tech platform on top despite being objectively awful? Awareness of the alternative, Network effects and “induced dependency”.
Network effect prevents people from exiting by themselves, they need to coordinate. A government can trivially solve the issue. Big Tech is about extracting value from Europe and slurping it back into the US, so not only can the government solve the coordination problem, but it has no risks of defection, it’s a unilateral win.
“Induced dependency” (I just made that one up) is how, because it is a tool, technology requires from you to learn it. And it takes time and energy. If you swap technology, you lose this procedural memory that allows you to be efficient with your tools. When the technology is how you communicate with your peers or work, that means you are dependent on the technology for your most fundamental human ability.
Swapping technologies require learning the new technology. You don’t know if you’ll ever be able to learn this new tool, or if it has the capabilities the previous one had. You put yourself in danger of losing your ability to communicate or work, which is a really bad perspective. (This is to link with the ridiculous push for LLMs)
Awareness is touchy. Are people really not aware of the alternative? For ecology, awareness was used as a way of not solving the actual systemic issue. But recent pooling show that people are aware up their nose about global warming, and effort spent on awareness is wasted.
Is it the same with libre technology? From talking to people, it seems to be different. The story I hear the most was “Modern tech is so bad, and suddenly I learn about those alternatives and I try them and they are amazing” So maybe talking about the alternative is a first step. I’d like to bring in the concept of “Cyberparties” that are tinny events grafted on larger ones (like festivals) where people are introduced to libre software and explained the downsides of big tech.
nicopap 08.03.25 at 10:59 am
Another comment on this: Big Tech as an issue isn’t as systemic as the environment and others. As an individual, you have a lot of power on which technology you use (though your power depends on how much exposure you have to non-mainstream tech, which is a systemic variable). Just today: you can get an ad, tracker blocker, a cookie notification blocker with a few clicks. You can get into better social networks, you can use email providers that respect your privacy at low cost.
Again, still there are systemic aspects to this: why do I need to install an ad blocker? What about my contacts still using bad email providers? Why is it so hard to get my own domain name? Should I give up my audience/friends on X? (hint: most engagement is artificial, not as big of a loss as one is led to believe) All kinds of surveillances can’t really be evaded, etc. But some individual actions do have immediate impact. (But again, can only work long term if complemented by a collective approach)
mw 08.04.25 at 9:41 pm
AlexSL @3
Here’s a list of search engines that will provide AI-free search results. Likewise, there are smart phones available that don’t run either iOS or the closed-source, Google version of Android (and a few that run entirely different OSes). If you’re employer uses MS Office, use it only on your work computer. Or if even that’s not acceptable, find another job. Does avoiding common OSes and platforms require some effort and giving up some benefits? Obviously it does — but the world is not obligated to spend huge sums in providing personalized options for minority tastes. And things like web browsers, search engines, and smart phone operating systems are enormously expensive to build and maintain (although, irony alert, who knows, maybe AI will drop development costs enough that more viable competition will emerge).
Alex SL 08.06.25 at 9:31 am
mw,
Just to be clear, I am a Linux and LibreOffice user; I can manage. People with less experience navigating OSes and software cannot, nor those forced into certain systems due to their employers.
And the problem cannot be solved even by a hypothetical AI revolution, because to a great degree these are natural monopolies. There is no reason to have more than one search engine, more than one microblogging platform, more than one smartphone OS, and more than one desktop/laptop OS on the planet; indeed, having more than one creates enormous inefficiencies due to incompatibility and lack of network effects. In other words, there are two three stable equilibria:
Competition and choice with massive inefficiency.
Single, central solutions run as a public service.
Single, central solutions run by for-profit companies that extract as much value as they can, let misinformation and hate spread if that helps the bottom line, and threaten the sovereignty of nations. That is what we have now.
mw 08.06.25 at 2:04 pm
AlexSL @7 “There is no reason to have more than one search engine, more than one microblogging platform, more than one smartphone OS, and more than one desktop/laptop OS on the planet”
But that’s not what we see. We have multiple OSes for mobile and desktop (and we don’t really ‘need’ different OSes for mobile vs desktop, do we?) We have multiple web browsers, multiple search engines, multiple OSes on various platforms (mobile, desktop, and server). Not only do these ‘natural monopolies’ somehow fail to materialize, but technological progress renders dominant technologies obsolete on a continuing basis. Remember when Internet Explorer vs Netscape was a huge deal for anti-trust? That’s laughably ancient history in 2025. Just now AI is putting the squeeze on the value of traditional search engine results (and advertising).
“indeed, having more than one creates enormous inefficiencies due to incompatibility and lack of network effects. ”
This is the fantasy that won’t die no matter how many decades (now going on centuries) of accumulated data we have. Competition creates far greater efficiency (and progress) than does public, centralized ownership of the means of production. This is just as true when it comes to collectivized tech development as it is for collectivized farming — network effects don’t overpower this dynamic.
Alex SL 08.06.25 at 10:51 pm
mw,
We must be living in different worlds. Sure, the dominant browsers have changed… from one dominant browser to one or two other dominant browsers. That is a part of software that is relatively easy to swap out.
But you cannot seriously argue that there is functioning competition in office software, operating systems, social media, or cloud storage. Nearly every employer uses Microsoft, and changing provider would be so disruptive that they would rather eat massive price hikes. Facebook and Twitter have become barely usable, but lots of people still hang on there because if they move, they lose all their followers and have to start from scratch elsewhere. Social networks are natural monopolies because there is no point to social networks if your friends, customers, or fans are spread out across twenty of them; you want to reach them all with one post. Dig behind any project that needs to store data or host websites, and in nearly all cases, you will find Amazon at the bottom.
Regarding the merits of competition, yes, competition is inefficient. Every company that goes bust because it didn’t make it on the market is an enormous waste. I think we can only afford this waste because our society has so much surplus that it doesn’t matter. Still, I agree, competition has benefits for incentivising good service delivery and for price-finding… when it can actually work. But that presupposes the existence of a free market that is maintained that way through well-enforced anti-trust regulation, low barriers of entry, rational consumer choices, no patents, no stickiness (like network effects, transition costs, vendor lock-in, or incompatibilities that force people to stick with inferior solutions even when better ones are available), and transparency (market models assume consumers have perfect knowledge of prices and available options).
None of these ever apply in real life. That being said, I agree competition will still have benefits if most of them apply to some degree. More importantly, however, these assumed preconditions very clearly do not apply at all to the systems that are the point of this post. As such, you have misunderstood what I am saying. Take as granted that competition would lead to good outcomes. My point is that competition relies on having lots of options you can choose between and switch easily (e.g., just call an electricity provider or insurance, and done); in social media, corporate software, operating systems, etc., switching is extremely expensive (e.g., the IT department will have to drop everything for months to prepare the transition, and then the entire corporation of 5,000 staff would have to learn how to use Ubuntu, LibreOffice, and InkScape instead of Windows, MS Office, and Adobe Illustrator, and many of them are so flaky with tech that it will take them a year to become productive again); thus the system tends towards monopolies; thus competition does not happen.
I made a mistake here in claiming that my first option is a stable equilibrium, because it really isn’t. It naturally evolves into the third option, which is where we are. A better alternative is the second option. Not for farming and corner shops, no, but for train tracks, power lines, armies, water pipes, social media, and operating systems. The difference here is between a very simplistic ideology, “markets make everything better”, and actually examining a given system as it is and recognising its incentive structures and natural evolution to diagnose its problems and find the best solution, which is, outside of freshman libertarian certainties, not always necessarily a market.
mw 08.07.25 at 10:59 am
AlexSL @9. I guess we do live in different worlds. For browsers we have Chrome, Edge, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Brave, and others. All are viable. For OSes Windows, Android, IOs, MacOS, and various flavors of Linux and Unix. There are also others used in more specialized situations (smart watches, TVs and set-top boxes, industrial machinery, etc). For productivity software, Google Docs is a viable (and relatively inexpensive) alternative that I’ve used quite a bit, but there are many others. Virtually all of them are capable of reading and writing MS Office format documents, so switching (or using more than one) is not difficult. For basic word processing and spreadsheet use (which is what the vast majority of users do), the learning curve is almost non-existent. Notably, too, office software is much cheaper in real terms than it was when it was introduced 30+ years ago, and for non-commercial users, it is effectively free.
No, competition doesn’t require that switching always be frictionless. It rarely is. But switching happens anyway. Look at social media — we seemed to have a few players whose positions appeared unassailable due to network effects, and then TikTok came out of nowhere, seemingly overnight. These industries are roiled not only by new players with new ideas but also by boredom, cultural change, the blooming and dying of fads.
“train tracks, power lines, armies, water pipes, social media, and operating systems. ”
You mashed things on the end of that list that simply don’t belong. The first half of your list consists of things that are either ‘natural monopolies’ due to properties of the physical world or ‘public goods’ (in the case of national defense) that the market would never supply. Social media and operating systems are neither of the above.
“actually examining a given system as it is and recognising its incentive structures and natural evolution to diagnose its problems and find the best solution”
If you think national governments have the capacity to disentangle incentive structures and re-engineer the natural evolution that occurs in dynamic markets without making hash of things and without trying to enrich various cronies and special interest groups, we really do live in different worlds.
And there’s a major rub with ‘digital sovereignty’ when it comes to the US and EU (or Australia) living in different digital worlds. Kevin Munger proposes that X should be banned. OK — how? What would prevent EU citizens from using X? Would the idea be for the EU to ask for Chinese help in building its very own ‘Great Firewall’ to make sure its citizens didn’t use problematic internet services?
nonrenormalizable 08.12.25 at 8:39 pm
I think mw @10 is being a bit naive in their depiction of choice in terms of technology platforms.
Essentially, in most cases, a choosing a provider of some software or tool boils down to your pick of the existing big tech titans and their highly integrated, increasingly walled-off stacks of services.
Take the case of browsers. Of the six or so mentioned, Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox are the ones capturing the vast majority of the market share, to different degrees depending on the methodology used. Three of them are products of big technological conglomerates — Google/Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft — who do everything they can to force you to use these browsers as the default in the various operating systems they provide. For a long time, Apple doesn’t let other browsers run their own rendering engines on iOS devices, making them essentially “wrappers” around Safari, but now the EU’s Digital Markets Act has forced this to change.
Google’s Chrome has the largest number of users by most measures, and is cross-platform, but might now start dropping users as it has stopped supporting the most effective ad-blockers, in part to ensure that YouTube ads are being seen. Firefox, the most popular independent(ish) browser, does a relatively decent job, but has grown far too dependent on revenue Google pays to be the default search engine — but really to prop up a competitor and avoid the ire of anti-trust regulators — and seems to be run by people intent on throwing out its best ideas. The Google money might run out if the US DoJ forces a sell-off of Chrome.
Of the minor players in the browser market, today most are forks of Firefox or Chrome/Chromium with added claims of privacy or security. These claims are hard to justify — when compared with e.g. plain Firefox with ad-blocking and no-script extensions — and in some cases, the unique selling-point actually seems to be some kind of crypto or AI grift or indeed data-harvesting. Some of the companies behind them seem to be engaged in … rather odd practices, let us say. The new owners of Opera, for instance, are a long way from the original group behind the innovative browser I used 15 years ago.
(And this is before we get into the fact that there are basically 2 rendering engines that all browsers use …)
As for the “breakthrough” of TikTok into the world of social media platforms, it’s hardly worth celebrating the emergence of yet another vector for misinformation, polarization and distraction. Putting the pros and cons of these platforms to one side for a moment, we are looking at the product of a company that is based in China. However modest its origins, once it took hold globally seven or so years ago, the Chinese government became vested in its success — so should we cheer the plucky CCP challenging the established social media players Meta, X and Google?
The last “different” social media entrant I can think of (i.e. one that isn’t attempting to be a Twitter/X replacement) was “BeReal” from a few years ago — but that seems to have fizzled out. And of course, any non state-backed/protected challengers to the existing platforms, if successful, eventually gets bought by one of them: see Instagram, WhatsApp (and LinkedIn and … GitHub?).
I also agree with Alex SL’s assessment in @7 and @9 that the old status quo in the 90s/early 2000s of many small to medium-scale providers providing user choice is inherently efficient and somewhat chaotic. Users deserve choice and competition often has the benefit of low prices, but even after two or more decades of the Internet being a central part of our lives, we can’t assess and verify the quality of products or providers in the same way as we do in the offline world. Smaller scale platforms may also be more vulnerable to market forces and go out of business, potentially leaving us without access to our data or any sort of long-term support.
Some degree of bundling of services — email, office suite, VPN — does make sense for both users and providers. But the key is interoperability between providers, i.e. the ability to migrate from one to another with as little friction as possible. The companies are not going to do this themselves, and it is only at the level of states — or rather, the supranational level — that this can be enforced.
As for what else the state can do, embracing and promoting free and open-source software, with interoperable standards, formats and protocols is one course of action. Using such tools in the machinery of the state itself — as suggested here — is a good start, as it provides a stable user base for developers to target, ensures a need for a certain standard of general technological literacy to be developed (i.e. not just whatever Microsoft or Apple allow you to learn), stops providing a cash cow for the big tech corporations to milk, and ensures that government is less reliant on such untrustworthy organizations.
mw 08.13.25 at 1:06 pm
nonrenormalizable @ 11. As for the “breakthrough” of TikTok into the world of social media platforms, it’s hardly worth celebrating the emergence of yet another vector for misinformation, polarization and distraction.
The point wasn’t whether TikTok was a good or bad development. The point was that seemingly unassailable positions built up through ‘lock-in’ and network effects are simply not unassailable. It appeared that Facebook owned social media. Until suddenly it didn’t. And notably Facebook didn’t lose it’s dominance through any kind of legally mandated interoperability. The same dynamic is seen right now in the deleterious effect of AI on traditional search and online advertising.
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