A new team will shortly tip up at the EU’s shiny Brussels Commission. Headed by the German politician Ursula von der Leyen, it will be looking for ways to promote faster economic growth and to maximise European influence in an unstable, unpredictable world. I offer a modest proposal. Europe should build a distinct framework for the digital economy — an ecosystem in which technology businesses flourish on terms set by, well, Europeans.
The fashion is to fret about a splintering of the internet. The founding US model is challenged by China’s walled garden. Russia and other authoritarian states are following Beijing’s lead. European regulators have been challenging the anti-competitive practices of US technology titans and suggesting they pay a half-decent amount of tax.
For those who did not believe that the cold war marked the end of history and a permanent American hegemony, this fragmentation always seemed pretty inevitable. In spite of the immense corporate clout of a handful of companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook, national political and cultural preferences at some point would assert themselves. The internet has become too big an actor in national political life to remain the property of a bunch of super-rich west coast libertarians.