An anonymous story in the Wall Street Journal contains the following claim: “The European Union’s executive branch is currently working on a new law aimed at improving technology sovereignty, according to officials familiar with the matter.
When a major news outlet anonymously posts claims about an event that hasn’t happened yet—in this case a law that supports tech companies in the EU—it’s worth asking why. After all, there may be commercial interests that want this trivial threat published in advance for dishonest or selfish reasons. But that doesn’t make the claim unworthy of consideration.
Citing “officials and lawmakers,” the Journal says that powerful people want to discourage “dependency” on the US, in addition to helping their companies, and they don’t really want to “discard” technology produced by Silicon Valley giants.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland this past week, the issue on everyone’s mind in Europe was Donald Trump’s strange request that the land of Greenland be given to him on a platter by Denmark – and his threat to introduce a tax on EU countries that he feels are failing him – the majority of Northern Europe, the UK, the UK, the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom has blocked the imposition of taxes on EU countries. chaos in this conflict: the threat of real war. That may have been because the most powerful people in the world, the bondholders, sent a clear message to Trump that they do not want war over Greenland.
But while tensions were high earlier this week, the EU did something really strange and excited that it might show a real backbone against the US by using its package of measures known as the “Anti-Coercion Instrument” (ACI). The ACI, also known as the “bazooka of trade,” is a set of tariffs and trade restrictions that were originally intended as a pointed weapon on China’s side. Instead, officials indicated that they might christen their bazooka by firing it in the US
European tech sovereignty is a buzzword with real power right now, even if the concept seems a little lacking at first glance. The Wall Street Journal’s framing of its story on the potential legislation is one of economic protection and restraint—not some kind of first strike. EU officials are apparently trembling in fear of “a White House order cutting off the region’s access to data centers or email software that businesses and governments need to operate,” the Journal wrote.
On the other hand, the EU cutting off access to basic technological needs does not really sound like something that Europe can do. Denying Americans access to Spotify based in Sweden and phones from Nokia based in Finland does not sound like any serious threats, which is why increasing EU companies seems like a natural focus for any effort, as it can cause pain by making US technology uncompetitive. Earlier this month, the European Commission announced a government-focused “Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy”, which is currently seeking public feedback. The elephants in the room for such an effort would be France’s Mistral as a source for EU-based AI models, and some sort of Eurozone-centric mobile operating system. Deep AI and Huawei’s HarmonyOS mobile operating system come to mind. Creating a cloud computing giant in Europe without megacompanies like Amazon and Microsoft would be difficult.
But the single biggest hammer is the EU he can look at beating the US (and another one not mentioned at all by the Wall Street Journal) ASML in the Netherlands, currently the only creator of the lithography machines in the world used to make the GPUs necessary for training and running frontier AI models. The reign in the machine that currently keeps the US economy on the rails is a piece of economic weapon even more powerful than the bazooka (it carries an economic plane at least, if not a small economic nuke, with intelligence) and because of its recent investment in the Mistral, it is very clear that the sovereignty of the EU is on the mind of ASML to some extent.
And taking quick steps towards EU tech supremacy, at least to some extent, the idea is not just to go around the halls of power, but to have real support from the grassroots, at least judging by the activity of Reddit’s BuyFromEU subreddit. Users who often share tips on finding locally sourced products are increasingly afraid of being banned from the US social media they now use to communicate. Some are even talking about moving to W, the recently announced European Social Media site alongside X.
And I wish Europe all the luck in the world to get another X to succeed and avoid being a cesspool. That is no easy task, even here in the good old USA
