The EU will not rip up its tech rules in an attempt to reach a trade deal with Donald Trump, the bloc’s most senior official on digital policy has said.
Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission vice-president responsible for tech sovereignty, indicated the EU was not going to compromise on its digital rulebook to reach an agreement on trade with the US – a key demand of Trump administration officials.
“We are very committed to our rules when it comes to the digital world,” Virkkunen said in an interview with European newspapers, including the Guardian. “We want to make sure that our digital environment in the European Union … that it is fair and it’s safe and it’s also democratic.”
She gently pushed back at suggestions that EU digital regulations could be considered trade barriers, saying the same rules applied to all companies, whether European, American or Chinese. “We are not specially targeting certain companies, but we have this risk-based approach in all our rules.”
Personally I would prefer if they preferred European companies in some cases, especially when it came to strategic matters and the danger of supply chain attacks or vendor lock-in. Or, even better, things that aren’t tied to any single company like open source projects.
This is what secnumcloud is in France, I hope Europe follows a similar approach.
Obviously Open Source is the way to go, but excluding non-European companies would just be playing the same stupid game the Trump administration is playing. We should stick to sensible regulations and let anyone who adheres to the rules play.
Well, the problem is that in a situation like the one we are in right now having software processes all locked into American companies is actually a huge strategic problem in certain areas so it makes sense to limit those (e.g. government, military,…) to software where that control can’t be taken away by a foreign power. So essentially those should be under our control for much the same reasons energy and food production should be.