Submitted by Thomas Kolbe
London and Brussels are coordinating their attacks on US tech giants. Under the flimsy pretext of consumer protection, they are trying to lay the groundwork for far-reaching censorship designs through multi-billion-dollar fines.
When Germany’s Minister of State for Culture, Wolfram Weimer, delivered his verbal assault on American digital platforms last week, it got somewhat lost amid the waves of his own hypocrisy. As we now know, the minister does not think too highly of copyright rules or private property.
Aggressively Defensive
Weimer branded Meta, Google and others as digital colonizers whose business model essentially depends on exploiting the creative potential of users and monetizing it for their own profit. The political response to this supposed injustice is to be a kind of digital tax, levied nationally to put an end to this behavior.
Of course, this is solely about providing the state, that over-satiated and over-fat Leviathan, with yet another source of revenue.
With his aggressive rhetoric, Weimer stands firmly in the tradition of recent EU policymaking, which increasingly resembles London’s digital doctrine.
What we are witnessing is a theatrical performance from a technologically sidelined continent. Brussels may cast the world’s densest net of digital regulations, but in this climate, no one dares to found startups capable of competing with American or Chinese tech giants or the AI industry.
These are rearguard actions, with sprawling regulatory catalogs designed to open the gates to censorship. The goal is to prevent the rise of counterpublics on platforms like X. Publics capable of pointing out the failures of European governance, EU centralization and the growing concentration of power in Brussels.
Absurd Fines
In their economic distress and with shrinking geopolitical weight, London and Brussels have begun imposing grotesque fines on the supposed misbehavior of American tech corporations.
Apple was recently ordered by the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to pay up to 1.5 billion pounds (1.75 billion euros), as the company allegedly abused market power and disadvantaged app developers through excessive commissions on in-app purchases and subscriptions between October 2015 and late 2020.
According to regulators, a commission of up to 30 percent per transaction is unjustified and restricted competition. Apple has announced it will appeal.
Apparently, the gentlemen in the “cradle of liberalism” remain unfamiliar with contractual freedom and individual sovereignty.
It is a similar picture in Brussels. The European Commission imposed a fine on Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, claiming the company offers only inadequate complaint systems and tools to report illegal content like terrorist propaganda or abuse imagery.
They also accuse Meta of denying researchers access to public data and deploying dark patterns to manipulate user choices. Meta is to pay 200 million euros and show more cooperation in the future.
The Battle for Data Sovereignty
At its core, this is about giving European regulators unrestricted access to user data and internal communications processes, very much in the spirit of the proposed chat control for private users. Europe has much more in store for its citizens.
True to this spirit, the European Commission already slapped Google with a record 2.95-billion-euro fine in September for alleged antitrust violations in online advertising. Since 2014, Google is said to have abused its market dominance by prioritizing its own products in ad placement and brokerage. The company must now rebuild its digital marketplace to rule out self-preferencing.
There is one small outlier in this European war against US digital dominance: the proceedings against TikTok, which remains heavily Chinese-controlled. A fine of 530 million euros looms over alleged data-protection violations, including unauthorized transfers of user data out of the EU to China. Lack of transparency in advertising and the absence of a functional ad register for researchers and users are also being challenged.
However, the TikTok theater mainly serves to distract Americans from the fact that Europe’s real intent is to challenge the US in digital economics with the regulatory bludgeon and create bargaining chips for the unresolved trade conflict.
The negotiation pattern is familiar: define maximal demands; escalate individual hotspots within the matrix of negotiations; accept the results with pious words while beginning the sabotage at the very moment of signing.
Central Planning vs. Individual Sovereignty
Even from a systemic perspective, the arguments of the European Commission and UK regulators do not hold. Every user enters a voluntary contract. So do app developers. Apple rightly notes that around 84 percent of apps in its store are free. And every individual is free to switch to alternative technologies, like Google’s Android. No one is forced to use TikTok or upload videos there.
Europe’s escalation strategy once again proves their discomfort with competition, private property and individual decision-making sovereignty. It would not be wrong to say they fundamentally misunderstand the principles of a free market economy.
The alleged argument of consumer protection is nothing but a cloak for a deeper political agenda aiming at censorship and the subjugation of private enterprise.
In reality, we are witnessing another escalation of invasive policies from centralized regulatory authorities in Brussels and London. Policies that the US government under President Donald Trump is unlikely to tolerate. Transatlantic tensions are rising. The next act of the trade dispute will unfold on precisely this digital battlefield and continue to intensify.
Perhaps this is the perfect moment for Donald Trump to slap London and Brussels on the fingers. A drastic increase in tariffs might give some of them pause and put pressure on policymakers to stop playing dangerous censorship games.
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About the author: Thomas Kolbe, born in 1978 in Neuss/ Germany, is a graduate economist. For over 25 years, he has worked as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.
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