LISBON, Portugal — Tech CEOs in Europe are urging the region and all countries to take bolder action to tackle Big Tech’s dominance and counter reliance on the US for critical technologies like artificial intelligence after Donald Trump’s electoral win.
The Republican politician’s victory was a key topic on various prominent tech bosses’ lips at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Many said they’re unsure of what to expect from the president-elect, citing unpredictability around what he’ll do in office as a core challenge currently.
Andy Yen, CEO of Swiss VPN developer Proton, thinks Europe should adopt a more “Europe-first” approach to technology — in part to reverse the trend of the last two decades where much of the Western world’s most important technologies, from web browsing to smartphones, have become dominated by a handful of large US tech firms.
VPNs, or virtual private networks, are services that encrypt data and mask a user’s IP address to hide browsing activity and bypass censorship.
“It’s time for Europe to step up,” Yen told CNBC on the sidelines of Web Summit. “It’s time to be bold. It’s time to be more aggressive. And the time is now because we now have a leader in the US that is America-first, so I think our European leaders should be Europe-first.”
One key push for the past decade from the European Union has been taking legal actions and introducing tough new regulations to tackle the dominance of large technology players, such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta.
With Trump set to come into power, there is a fear that Europe might reel in its tough approach to tech giants out of fear of retaliation from the new administration. The Digital Markets Act, for example, is a landmark EU regulation targeting tech giants’ market dominance.
US Big Tech ‘playing extremely unfairly’
However, Proton’s Yen urged the EU not to water down its push to rein in America’s tech giants.
“Europe has been thinking in a very globalist mindset. They’re thinking we need to be fair to everybody, we need to open our market to everybody, we need to play fair, because we believe in fairness,” he told CNBC.
“Well, guess what? The Americans and the Chinese didn’t get the memo. They have been playing extremely unfairly for the last 20 years. And now they have a president that is extremely America-first.”
Mitchell Baker, CEO of American open internet non-profit Mozilla Foundation, said the EU’s DMA has led to meaningful changes for the Firefox browser, with activity having increased since Google implemented a “choice screen” on Android phones that enables users to choose which search engine they want to use.
“The change in Firefox new users and market share on Android is noticeable,” Baker said. “That’s nice for us — but it’s also an indicator of how much power and centralized distribution that these companies have.”
“This change in usage because of one choice screen isn’t the full picture. But it is an indicator of the kind of things that consumers can’t choose and that businesses can’t build successfully because of the way the tech industry is structured right now,” she added.
Thomas Plantenga, CEO of Lithuania-headquartered used clothing resale app Vinted, urged Europe to take the “right choices” to ensure the continent can “fend for ourselves” and not get “left behind.”
“If you look very realistically at what countries do, they try to take care of themselves and they try to form coalitions to be stronger themselves, and as a coalition be stronger,” Plantenga told CNBC in an interview. “We have a lot of very talented, well-educated people.”
“We need to ensure that we can take care of our own safety, that we can take care of our own energy, that we ensure to keep on investing in our education and innovation so that we can keep up with the rest,” he added . “If we don’t, then we’ll be left behind. In every collaboration, it’s always a trade. And if we don’t have much to trade, we become weaker.”
‘AI sovereignty’ now a key battleground
Another theme that attracted much chatter on the ground at Web Summit was the idea of ”AI sovereignty.”
The terms refer to the concept that countries and regions should look to localize critical computing infrastructure behind AI services so that these systems become more reflective of local languages, cultures and values.
With Microsoft becoming a key player in AI, there are concerns that the maker of the Windows operating system and Office productivity tools suite has secured a dominant position when it comes to foundational AI tools.
The tech giant is a key backer behind ChatGPT maker OpenAI, whose technology it also uses heavily in its own products.
For some startups, Microsoft’s embrace of AI has resulted in harmful, anti-competitive effects.
Last year, Microsoft hiked the fees it charges search engines for use of its Bing Search APIs, which allow developers access to its backend search infrastructure — in part because of higher costs attached to its AI-powered search features.
“They’re gradually reducing our revenue — we’re still relying on them — and that reduces our capacity to do things,” Christian Kroll, CEO of sustainability-focused search engine Ecosia, told CNBC. “Microsoft is a very fierce competitor.”
Microsoft was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
Ecosia recently partnered with fellow search provider Qwant on a joint venture aimed at building a European search index to reduce their dependence on US Big Tech to serve users’ web browsing results.
The European Union’s AI Act, a landmark artificial intelligence law with global implications, introduces new transparency requirements and restrictions on both companies developing and using AI.
The laws are likely to have a big impact on predominantly US tech firms, since they’re the ones doing much of the development of — and investment in — AI.
With Trump set to come into power, it’s unclear what that could mean for the global AI regulatory landscape.
Shelley McKinley, chief legal officer of GitHub, said she doesn’t have a “crystal ball” to know what Trump might do — but in the meantime, businesses are planning for a range of different scenarios.
“We will learn in the next few months what President-elect Trump will say and in January we will start seeing some of what President Trump does in this area,” McKinley said in a CNBC-moderated panel earlier this week.
GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, is a code repository platform popular with open-source software programmers.
“I do think it is important that we all as society, as businesses, as people continue to think about the different scenarios,” McKinley added. “I think, as with any political change, as with any world change, we’re still all thinking about what are all of the scenarios we might operate in.”
