Thomas Plantenga, CEO of second-hand fashion resale app Vinted, takes center stage at Web Summit 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Harry Murphy | Internet Summit Sportsfile Getty Images
LISBON, Portugal — After Donald Trump won the election, European tech CEOs urged the region and all countries to take bolder action to address the dominance of big tech companies and reduce reliance on critical technologies such as American artificial intelligence.
The Republican politician’s victory was a key talking point for many prominent tech giants at the Internet Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. Many say they are unsure what to expect from the president-elect, citing the unpredictability of what he will do in office as a core challenge.
Andy Yen, chief executive of Swiss VPN developer Proton, believes Europe should take a more “Europe-first” approach to technology, in part to reverse the trend of the past two decades that has seen many of the Western world’s most important technologies move away from Web browsing onto smartphones has been dominated by a handful of large U.S. technology companies.
VPNs, or virtual private networks, are services that encrypt data and mask users’ IP addresses to hide browsing activity and bypass censorship.
“It’s time for Europe to step up,” Yen told CNBC on the sidelines of an online summit. “It’s time to be bold. It’s time to be more aggressive. The time is now because we now have an America-first leader, so I think our European leaders should be Europe-first.”
A key EU push over the past decade has been to take legal action and introduce tough new regulations to combat the dominance of big tech companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta.
With Trump on the verge of taking office, there are concerns that Europe could get tough on tech giants out of fear of retaliation from the new administration. For example, the Digital Markets Act is a landmark EU regulation targeting the market dominance of tech giants.
Large American technology companies “play extremely unfair”
However, Proton’s yen urged the EU not to downplay efforts to rein in US tech giants.
“Europe has always thought with a very global mentality. They believe we need to be fair to everyone, we need to open our markets to everyone, we need fair competition because we believe in fairness,” he told CNBC.
“Well, guess what? The Americans and the Chinese didn’t get the memo. They’ve been playing extremely unfairly for the past 20 years. And now they have a president who is extremely America-first.”
Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, a US open network non-profit organization, said that the EU’s DMA has brought meaningful changes to the Firefox browser. Since Google implemented the “selection screen” on Android phones, it has Users are able to choose which engine they want to use to search for content since the activity was added.
“The changes in new Firefox users and Android market share are very obvious,” Baker said. “That’s great for us, but it’s also an indicator of how much power and centralization these companies have.”
“The changes in usage due to single-choice screens are not the full picture. But it illustrates the things consumers can’t choose and the things businesses can’t successfully build because of the way the tech industry is structured right now,” she added.
Thomas Plantenga, chief executive of Lithuania-based second-hand clothing resale app Vinted, has urged Europe to make “the right choices” to ensure the continent can “self-reliance” rather than “fall behind”.
Plantenga told CNBC: “If you look very realistically at what countries are doing, they are trying to take care of themselves and trying to form alliances to make themselves stronger, and as a alliance, they are also “We have a lot of very talented, well-educated people. “
“We need to make sure we can take care of our own security, we can take care of our own energy, and we make sure we continue to invest in our education and innovation so that we can keep up with everyone else,” he added. “If we don’t do that, then we’re going to be left behind. In every partnership, it’s always a transaction. If we don’t have much to trade, we’re going to be weaker.”
“Artificial Intelligence Sovereignty” Has Now Become a Key Battlefield
Another topic that was widely discussed at the Internet Summit was the idea of ”artificial intelligence sovereignty.”
These terms refer to countries and regions that should seek to localize the critical computing infrastructure behind AI services so that these systems better reflect local languages, cultures and values.
As Microsoft becomes a key player in artificial intelligence, there are concerns that the maker of the Windows operating system and Office suite of productivity tools has become dominant in basic artificial intelligence tools.
The tech giant is a major backer of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and its technology is heavily used in its own products.
For some startups, Microsoft’s embrace of artificial intelligence has led to harmful, anti-competitive effects.
Last year, Microsoft raised the cost of its search engine using its Bing search API, which allows developers to access its back-end search infrastructure, in part because its artificial intelligence search capabilities are more expensive.
“They are chipping away at our revenue while we are still dependent on them, which reduces our ability to do things,” Christian Kroll, CEO of sustainability-focused search engine Ecosia, told CNBC. “Microsoft is a very fierce competitor. “
Microsoft had no immediate comment when contacted by CNBC.
Ecosia recently formed a joint venture with fellow search provider Qwant to build a European search index to reduce reliance on large U.S. technology companies to serve users’ web browsing results.
The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act is a landmark artificial intelligence law with global influence. It introduces new transparency requirements and restrictions for companies developing and using artificial intelligence.
These laws are likely to have a significant impact on primarily U.S. technology companies, which are the bulk of AI development and investment.
With Trump on the verge of taking office, it’s unclear what this will mean for the global AI regulatory landscape.
Shelley McKinley, GitHub’s chief legal officer, said she doesn’t have a “crystal ball” to know what Trump might do, but in the meantime, companies are planning for a range of different scenarios.
“We’re going to find out over the next few months what President-elect Trump is going to say, and in January we’re going to start to see what President-elect Trump is saying in this area,” McKinley said on a CNBC panel earlier this week. something to do.
GitHub, owned by Microsoft, is a code storage platform popular among open source software programmers.
“I do think it’s important that we all continue to think about different scenarios as a society, as businesses, as people,” McKinley added. “I think like any political change, any change in the world “We are still thinking about all the scenarios we might face.”
