If the previous 5 years of EU tech guidelines might take human kind, they might embody Thierry Breton. The bombastic commissioner, along with his swoop of white hair, grew to become the general public face of Brussels’ irritation with American tech giants, touring Silicon Valley final summer season to personally remind the business of looming regulatory deadlines.
Combative and outspoken, Breton warned that Apple had spent too lengthy “squeezing” different firms out of the market. In a case towards TikTok, he emphasised, “our kids are not 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 imprecise however threatening letter on his account reminding Musk there could be penalties if he used his platform to amplify “dangerous content material.” Final yr, 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 agreement, making it tough for Pichai to again out.
But on this week’s reshuffle of high EU jobs, Breton resigned—a call he alleged was as a consequence of backroom dealing between EU Fee president Ursula von der Leyen and French president Emmanuel Macron.
“I am certain [the tech giants are] comfortable Mr. Breton will go, as a result of he understood you need to hit shareholders’ pockets with regards to fines,” says Umberto Gambini, a former adviser on the EU Parliament and now a accomplice at consultancy Ahead World.
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 fashion will certainly be much less brutal and perhaps much less seen on X than Breton,” says Gambini. “It might be a chance to restart and reboot the relations.”
Little is understood about Virkkunen’s angle to Large Tech’s function in Europe’s economic system. However her function 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 workforce however function below the upgraded title of govt vp for tech sovereignty, safety and democracy, which means she experiences on to von der Leyen.
The 27 commissioners, who kind von der Leyen’s new workforce and are every tasked with a distinct space of focus, nonetheless should be authorised 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 desirous about and proposing new laws to counter all these totally different threats that they’d 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.”