Tomas Plantenga, CEO of used fashion resale app Vinted, takes center stage at Web Summit 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Harry Murphy | Web Summit Sports File Getty Images
LISBON, Portugal — CEOs of European tech companies are taking bolder action to counter Big Tech’s dominance and dependence on the United States for key technologies such as artificial intelligence following Donald Trump’s election victory. We are calling on the region and all countries to take action.
Victories for Republican politicians were a key topic on the lips of heads of various prominent technology companies at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Many said they did not know what to expect from the next president, pointing to the unpredictability of what he would do when he took office as the main challenge now.
Andy Yen, CEO of Swiss VPN developer Proton, believes Europe should adopt a more “Europe-first” approach to technology. It’s also a reversal of the past two decades’ trend in which many of the Western world’s most important technologies, from web browsing to surfing the Internet, have become mainstream. Smartphones have become dominated by a few large US tech companies.
A VPN, or virtual private network, is a service that encrypts your data and masks your IP address to hide your browsing activity and avoid censorship.
“It’s time for Europe to step up,” Yen told CNBC on the sidelines of the Web Summit. “It’s time to be bold. It’s time to be more aggressive. And now is the time. We have America-first leaders in the United States, so I think European leaders should also be Europe-first.” ”.
One of the European Union’s main initiatives over the past decade has been to take legal action and impose tough new regulations to counter the dominance of big technology companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. It was to be introduced.
With the Trump administration just around the corner, there are concerns that Europe will waver in its tough approach toward big tech companies, fearing retaliation from the new administration. For example, the Digital Markets Act is a landmark EU regulation targeting the market dominance of tech giants.
Big Tech in the US is ‘acting in a very unfair manner’
But Proton’s Yen urged the EU not to weaken its efforts to rein in US tech giants.
“Europe has been thinking in a very globalist way. We need to be fair to everyone, we need to open markets to everyone, we need to act fairly,” he told CNBC. “We believe in fairness,” he said.
“Well, guess what? The Americans and the Chinese didn’t get the memo. They’ve been fighting a very unfair battle for the past 20 years, and now they have a very America-first president. There is.”
Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, an American open internet nonprofit, said the EU’s DMA would bring meaningful changes to the Firefox browser and that Google would give Android phones the ability to choose which searches users want to search. He said there has been an increase in activity since the introduction of the screen. The engine they want to use.
“The change in Firefox new users and market share on Android is significant,” Baker said. “That’s nice for us, but it’s also an indicator of how much power and centralized distribution these companies have.”
“This change in usage due to a single choice screen is not the whole story, but it is because of the way the technology industry is structured that consumers don’t have the kinds of choices they can’t make, and companies can’t build well. Showing things right now,” she added.
Tomas Plantenga, CEO of Vinted, a Lithuanian-based second-hand clothes resale app, has urged Europe to help the continent “fend for itself” rather than “be left behind”. He asked them to make the “right choice.”
“If you look at the behavior of countries very realistically, they are trying to take care of themselves, to make themselves stronger, and to become even stronger as a union,” Plantenga said in an interview with CNBC. “We are trying to form a coalition,” he said. “We have a lot of very talented and educated people.”
“We need to keep ourselves safe, take charge of our own energy, and make sure we continue to invest in education and innovation so we can catch up with the rest.” he added. . “If we don’t, we will be left behind. In any collaboration, there is always a need to trade. And if we don’t have much to trade, we are weak.”
“AI sovereignty” is now an important battleground
Another topic that gained a lot of buzz on the ground at Web Summit was the idea of “AI sovereignty.”
The term refers to the concept that countries and regions need to localize the critical computing infrastructure behind AI services so that these systems are more reflective of local languages, cultures, and values. point.
As Microsoft becomes a major player in AI, there are concerns that the maker of the Windows operating system and Office productivity tools suite has secured a dominant position when it comes to fundamental AI tools.
The tech giant is a major backer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and uses its technology heavily in its own products.
For some startups, Microsoft’s adoption of AI has had harmful anti-competitive effects.
Last year, Microsoft increased the fees it charges search engines for using the Bing Search API, which gives developers access to the company’s back-end search infrastructure. This was partly due to the high cost of the AI-powered search function.
“They are slowly reducing our revenue and we are still dependent on them, so that reduces our ability to operate,” says sustainability-focused search engine Ecosia. CEO Christian Kroll told CNBC. “Microsoft is a very fierce competitor.”
CNBC contacted Microsoft and did not immediately receive comment.
Ecosia recently partnered with search provider Qwant in a joint venture to build a European search index to reduce dependence on US Big Tech to provide users’ web browsing results. .
The European Union’s AI Law is a landmark artificial intelligence law with global implications, introducing new transparency requirements and restrictions for both companies developing and using AI.
This law is likely to have a major impact, primarily on US technology companies. Because they are doing much of the development and investment in AI.
President Trump’s inauguration is just around the corner, but it is unclear what implications this will have on the state of AI regulation around the world.
Shelley McKinley, GitHub’s chief legal officer, said she doesn’t have a “crystal ball” to know what Trump will do, but in the meantime, the company is planning for a variety of different scenarios. Ta.
“We’ll see what President-elect Trump will say in the next few months, and we’ll start to see in January what President Trump will do in this area,” McKinley said in a panel moderated by CNBC earlier this week. I guess so,” he said.
GitHub, owned by Microsoft, is a popular code repository platform for open source software programmers.
“I think it’s important that we all continue to think about different scenarios, as a society, as businesses, as people,” McKinley added. “As with any political change or any change in the world, I think we’re still thinking about what kind of scenario we’re going to operate in.”
