If the previous 5 years of EU tech guidelines may take human kind, they’d embody Thierry Breton. The bombastic commissioner, together with his swoop of white hair, turned the general public face of Brussels’ irritation with American tech giants, touring Silicon Valley final summer season to personally remind the business of looming regulatory deadlines.
Combative and outspoken, Breton warned that Apple had spent too lengthy “squeezing” different corporations out of the market. In a case towards TikTok, he emphasised, “our youngsters are not guinea pigs for social media.”
His confrontational angle to the CEOs themselves was seen in his posts on X. Within the lead-up to Musk’s interview with Donald Trump, Breton posted a imprecise however threatening letter on his account reminding Musk there could be penalties if he used his platform to amplify “dangerous content material.” Final 12 months, he revealed a photograph with Mark Zuckerberg, declaring a brand new EU motto of “transfer quick to make things better”—a jibe on the infamous early Fb slogan. And in a 2023 assembly with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Breton reportedly received him to conform to an “AI pact” on the spot, earlier than tweeting the agreement, making it tough for Pichai to again out.
But on this week’s reshuffle of prime EU jobs, Breton resigned—a call he alleged was on account of backroom dealing between EU Fee president Ursula von der Leyen and French president Emmanuel Macron.
“I am positive [the tech giants are] joyful Mr. Breton will go, as a result of he understood you must hit shareholders’ pockets relating to fines,” says Umberto Gambini, a former adviser on the EU Parliament and now a associate at consultancy Ahead International.
Breton is to be successfully changed by the Finnish politician Henna Virkkunen, from the center-right EPP Group, who has beforehand labored on the Digital Providers Act.
“Her type will certainly be much less brutal and perhaps much less seen on X than Breton,” says Gambini. “It could possibly be a possibility to restart and reboot the relations.”
Little is understood about Virkkunen’s angle to Large Tech’s position in Europe’s economic system. However her position has been reshaped to suit von der Leyen’s priorities for her subsequent five-year time period. Whereas Breton was the commissioner for the interior market, Virkkunen will work with the identical crew however function below the upgraded title of government vice chairman for tech sovereignty, safety and democracy, that means she studies on to von der Leyen.
The 27 commissioners, who kind von der Leyen’s new crew and are every tasked with a special space of focus, nonetheless should be authorized by the European Parliament—a course of that would take weeks.
“[Previously], it was very, very clear that the fee was bold when it got here to fascinated by and proposing new laws to counter all these totally different threats that they’d perceived, particularly these posed by massive know-how platforms,” says Mathias Vermeulen, public coverage director at Brussels-based consultancy AWO. “That isn’t a political precedence anymore, within the sense that laws has been adopted and now must be enforced.”
