Thomas Plantenga, CEO of second-hand fashion resale app Vinted, takes center stage at Web Summit 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
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LISBON, Portugal — After Donald Trump won the election, European tech CEOs urged countries in the region to take bolder action to confront the dominance of Big Tech and eliminate reliance on U.S. reliance on key technologies such as artificial intelligence.
The Republican politician’s victory was a key talking point among prominent tech giants at an Internet summit in Lisbon, Portugal. Many attendees said they were unsure what to expect from the U.S. president-elect, calling this unpredictability a core challenge right now.
Andy Yen, chief executive of Swiss VPN developer Proton, said Europe should respond to U.S. protectionism and adopt a more “Europe-first” approach to technology, reversing some of the past two decades. A trend during which many of the Western world’s most important countries have come to dominate technology, from web browsing to smartphones, to a handful of large U.S. tech companies.
VPNs, or virtual private networks, are services that encrypt data and mask users’ IP addresses to hide browsing activity and bypass censorship.
“It’s time for Europe to step up,” Yen told CNBC on the sidelines of an online summit. “It’s time to be bold. It’s time to be more aggressive. The time is now because we now have an American leader who is ‘America first,’ so I think our European leaders should be ‘Europe first.'”
A key EU push over the past decade has been to take legal action and introduce tough new regulations to combat the dominance of big tech companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta.
As Trump prepares to take office for a second time, concerns are growing that Europe could get tough on tech giants out of fear of retaliation from the new administration.
The behavior of big US tech companies is ‘extremely unfair’
Proton’s Yen, for example, urged the European Union not to water down its efforts to rein in U.S. tech giants.
“Europe has always thought with a very global mentality. They believe we need to be fair to everyone, we need to open our markets to everyone, we need fair competition because we believe in fairness,” he told CNBC.
“Well, guess what? The Americans and the Chinese didn’t get the memo. They’ve been competing extremely unfairly for the past 20 years. And now they have an extremely ‘America First’ president.”
Mitchell Baker, former CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, a US open internet non-profit, said the EU’s DMA has brought meaningful changes to the Firefox browser since Google implemented a “selection screen” on Android phones. Allowing users to select search engines since activity continues to increase.
“The changes in new Firefox users and Android market share are very obvious,” Baker said. “That’s great for us, but it’s also an indicator of how much power and centralization these companies have.”
She added, “The changes in usage due to single-choice screens are not the full picture. But it shows what consumers can’t choose and what businesses can’t successfully build because of the way technology has structured the industry now.”
Thomas Plantenga, CEO of Lithuania-based second-hand clothing resale app Vinted, has urged Europe to make “the right choices” to ensure the continent can be “self-reliant” and not “left behind”.
Plantenga told CNBC: “If you look very realistically at what countries are doing, they are trying to take care of themselves and trying to form alliances to make themselves stronger, and as a alliance, they are also “We have a lot of very talented, well-educated people. “
“We need to make sure that we can take care of our own security, that we can take care of our own energy, that we make sure that we continue to invest in our education and innovation so that we can keep up with the rest of the world),” he stressed. “If we don’t do that, then we’re going to be left behind. In every partnership, it’s always a trade. If we don’t have much to trade, we’re going to be weaker.”
“Artificial Intelligence Sovereignty” Has Now Become a Key Battlefield
Another topic that was widely discussed at the Internet Summit was the concept of “artificial intelligence sovereignty”, that is, countries and regions localize the key computing infrastructure behind artificial intelligence services so that these systems more reflect regional languages, cultures and values. .
As Microsoft becomes a key player in artificial intelligence, there are concerns that the maker of the Windows operating system and Office suite of productivity tools has become dominant in basic artificial intelligence tools.
The tech giant is a major backer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, whose technology is used heavily in its own products.
For some startups, Microsoft’s decision to embrace artificial intelligence has resulted in harmful, anti-competitive effects.
Last year, Microsoft raised the cost of its search engine using its Bing search API, which allows developers to access the tech giant’s back-end search infrastructure, in part because of the higher cost of its artificial intelligence search capabilities.
“They are chipping away at our revenue while we are still dependent on them, which reduces our ability to do things,” Christian Kroll, CEO of sustainability-focused search engine Ecosia, told CNBC. “Microsoft is a very fierce competitor. “
CNBC has reached out to Microsoft for comment.
Ecosia recently partnered with fellow search provider Qwant to build a European search index and reduce its reliance on large U.S. technology companies to provide web browsing results.
At the same time, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, a landmark artificial intelligence law with global influence, has imposed new transparency requirements and restrictions on companies developing and using artificial intelligence.
These laws are likely to have a significant impact on primarily U.S. technology companies, which are the bulk of artificial intelligence development and investment.
With Trump on the verge of taking office, it’s unclear what this will mean for the global AI regulatory landscape.
Shelley McKinley, chief legal officer of code storage platform GitHub, said she couldn’t predict what Trump would do in his second term, but companies were planning for a range of different scenarios.
“We’re going to find out over the next few months what President-elect Trump is going to say, and in January we’re going to start to see President Trump in this area,” McKinley said during a panel discussion hosted by CNBC earlier this week. some things done.
“I do think it’s important for us as a society, as businesses, as people, to continue to think about different scenarios,” she added. “I think like any political change, any world change, we’re still thinking about what we All possible options.”
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