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PS OnPoint
Special Edition Magazine, Spring 2020: Beyond the Techlash
How Europe Rules the Digital Economy
Apr 20, 2020 Anu Bradford
Europe is not home to any of the major tech firms, but it shapes digital governance worldwide, owing to the size and attractiveness of its market. Whereas American-style techno-libertarianism and Chinese digital authoritarianism have both come up short, the European Union's regulatory approach has emerged as a global gold standard.
NEW YORK – Today's "tech war" is often portrayed as a contest for digital dominance between just two powers: China and the United States. The US is home to the world's most powerful and profitable tech companies – including Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, whose combined market value exceeds $5 trillion. China has the telecommunications titan Huawei, the Internet and gaming giant Tencent, and the world's largest e-commerce retailer, Alibaba. Without its own search engine rivaling Google or a social-media platform comparable to Facebook, Europe might look like it is sitting on the sidelines of the digital economy.
But quite the opposite is true. More often than not, it is the European Union that sets the rules by which multinational tech companies operate. As the world's antitrust chief, the EU keeps global tech companies' market behavior in check, even when their home regulators let them operate free of regulatory constraints. Between 2017 and 2019, the EU imposed almost $10 billion in fines on Google for its anticompetitive practices.
In addition, EU regulations often determine how big tech companies gather, process, store, and monetize personal data. For example, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have all adopted one global privacy policy – and it is one that mirrors the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Similarly, EU rules influence the types of speech that Internet companies will allow on their platforms. Instead of being guided by America's First Amendment free-speech protections, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube follow the EU's definition of hate speech worldwide when deciding which content to remove from their platforms.
Anu Bradford, Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School, is a senior scholar at Columbia Business School's Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business. She is the author of The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World.
0 Comments on this paragraph, 2 in all 2 Comments on this article
mahak Yaseri Apr 29, 2020
But surely this can work in the opposite direction as well. Given such a huge customer base, these powerful companies can also force regulators to back down as well. Was this not the case with What's App a while ago?
adarsh adarsh Apr 22, 2020
Nice Article Anu. EU has played the role of Monitor for all the global tech giants in the absence of universal policies that protect individuals.
adarsh@novum.co.in
https://prosyn.org/nIF1YUq
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