The EU’s efforts to crack down on Big Tech have resulted in weeks of fines and debates to tackle child safety online, and Friday’s investigation into TikTok’s teen account settings is the latest piece of a greater policy puzzle to regulate social media giants.
Each new multi-million euro fine on Google, Apple and Meta raises a blunt question for Europeans: are tougher rules on online giants worth the risk of higher US tariffs?
Google has been fined close to €1bn by the EU due to its search engine monopoly, which prioritised Google Flights or Google Store over other results, and for charging business too much on Google Play.
France is leading for the way for the EU to restrict youth access to social media, but its blanket ban poses concern to critics of the Australian model for not addressing the root cause of the problem.
The EU has left the door open to age-estimation by behavioural profiling, and the EU’s own data protection authorities have warned that this can be more intrusive than the verification it replaces, inferring age from a user’s activity at scale, with weaker accuracy for the children it is meant to protect.
As EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen pushes to curb what experts call “addictive” online environments for under-13s, EU capitals are already split over how tough to be — and how to police it.
With the European Parliament’s resistance weakening and the powerful European People’s Party group shifting in favour of tougher controls, this surprise win for message-scanning could clear the way for an even more far‑reaching “Chat Control 2.0” that targets encrypted apps next.
“We do not expect children to design their own seatbelts. We do not expect parents to fit airbags at home. And the very same must be true for Big Tech,” warned Ursula von der Leyen, as momentum is building for an EU-wide social media ban, and the commission is feeling the heat. The EU Commission president hopes to have practical restrictions made into a proposal by autumn.
Data centres are mostly not built to withstand hostile attack, and the Iranian drones that struck Amazon’s sites in the Gulf showed that threat is no longer hypothetical. Cybersecurity incidents are also rising, and they tend to target data centres’ power and cooling systems and their interface with the grid.
The digital euro is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore people’s access to public money and to realise a sovereign payment system in the digital age. Trilogue negotiators should not squander it by designing it in a way that serves the banking sector first and the public second.
To fundamentally understand why it’s strange the EU Commission is throwing its weight behind this new for-profit social platform, you need to understand what lies beneath.
The EU Commission’s decision to appoint the chair of Siemens, Jim Hagemann Snabe, as AI envoy is rife with extraordinary conflicts of interest. Brussels is currently engaged in an unprecedented rollback of digital, social, and environmental rules, which often closely mirror industry lobbying demands. Now it seems that corporate interests don’t just have a seat at the table — they have an office in the Berlaymont.
The EU has denied that foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas will attend Dialog, the secretive society event hosted by German-American billionaire and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, after a leak revealed her name on the list of attendees.
By binding cloud services, AI and chips to Europe’s security and economic independence, the EU’s new tech sovereignty plan edges the bloc closer to a power struggle with Washington and Beijing.
Some MEPs doubted the EU Commission had enough manpower to take on the giant legal teams of Big Tech companies – which have been pushing back strongly against the EU’s flagship Digital Markets Act.
“Citizens can make personal choices – I decided on the Fairphone, with a Murena operating system, which is de-Googled,” said Belgian AI expert.
Pope Leo has chosen to confront one of the most pressing issues of our time by placing lethal autonomous weapons and the militarisation of artificial intelligence at the centre of his thinking.
A citizen lodged a claim for privacy breach. What they didn’t expect was an encouragement to settle with the most controversial user of personal data in Big Tech.
Next time you hear an EU commissioner say the AI Act needs to be ‘simplified’, the honest translation is: a company asked them to do that, and they said yes.
From concerns over Israel to getting negotiations right with “our American friends,” data protection has been no walk in the park for veteran EU supervisor Wojciech Wiewiórowski.