If the previous 5 years of EU tech guidelines might take human kind, they might embody Thierry Breton. The bombastic commissioner, together with his swoop of white hair, turned the general public face of Brussels’ irritation with American tech giants, touring Silicon Valley final summer time to personally remind the trade of looming regulatory deadlines.
Combative and outspoken, Breton warned that Apple had spent too lengthy “squeezing” different corporations out of the market. In a case in opposition to TikTok, he emphasised, “our youngsters aren’t guinea pigs for social media.”
His confrontational angle to the CEOs themselves was seen in his posts on X. Within the lead-up to Musk’s interview with Donald Trump, Breton posted a obscure however threatening letter on his account reminding Musk there could be penalties if he used his platform to amplify “dangerous content material.” Final 12 months, he printed a photograph with Mark Zuckerberg, declaring a brand new EU motto of “transfer quick to sort things”—a jibe on the infamous early Fb slogan. And in a 2023 assembly with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Breton reportedly acquired him to conform to an “AI pact” on the spot, earlier than tweeting the settlement, making it tough for Pichai to again out.
But on this week’s reshuffle of prime EU jobs, Breton resigned—a call he alleged was resulting from backroom dealing between EU Fee president Ursula von der Leyen and French president Emmanuel Macron.
“I am certain [the tech giants are] pleased Mr. Breton will go, as a result of he understood you need to hit shareholders’ pockets in the case of fines,” says Umberto Gambini, a former adviser on the EU Parliament and now a associate at consultancy Ahead International.
Breton is to be successfully changed by the Finnish politician Henna Virkkunen, from the center-right EPP Group, who has beforehand labored on the Digital Companies Act.
“Her type will certainly be much less brutal and possibly much less seen on X than Breton,” says Gambini. “It could possibly be a possibility to restart and reboot the relations.”
Little is understood about Virkkunen’s angle to Massive Tech’s position in Europe’s economic system. However her position has been reshaped to suit von der Leyen’s priorities for her subsequent five-year time period. Whereas Breton was the commissioner for the inner market, Virkkunen will work with the identical staff however function underneath the upgraded title of government vice chairman for tech sovereignty, safety and democracy, that means she reviews on to von der Leyen.
The 27 commissioners, who kind von der Leyen’s new staff and are every tasked with a special space of focus, nonetheless need to be accepted by the European Parliament—a course of that might take weeks.
“[Previously], it was very, very clear that the fee was bold when it got here to excited about and proposing new laws to counter all these completely different threats that that they had perceived, particularly these posed by huge expertise platforms,” says Mathias Vermeulen, public coverage director at Brussels-based consultancy AWO. “That’s not a political precedence anymore, within the sense that laws has been adopted and now must be enforced.”
