Let’s play a game: name one major technology company that has emerged from Europe in the last 15 years other than Spotify. Can’t think of one? That’s because the European Union is a tariff cartel that stifles the innovation of its own member states, over-regulates any US companies that manage to enter the EU, and then pillages its treasury. This has disastrous consequences, not least the recent collapse of CrowdStrike.
The EU is ridiculously far behind the US, China and even India in technological innovation. This should not be the case: Europe is a continent with highly developed economies, one of the world’s highest levels of education and a consumer market larger than that of the US.
Despite these benefits, the EU’s innovation-stifling technology policies have weakened economic performance. The current EU member states’ share of global gross domestic product has fallen by half since 1980. Determined to spread misery, Eurocrats have long imposed ridiculous requirements on U.S. companies seeking to serve their customers. Since 2009, Microsoft has been working on an agreement with the European Commission that would allow outside software developers to access the kernel. This means that it is impossible for Microsoft to wall off its operating system in a way that would provide enhanced cybersecurity or even ongoing maintenance and updates.
“A Microsoft spokesman said the company could not seal off its operating system in the same way as Apple because it had reached an agreement with the European Commission following a complaint,” the Wall Street Journal.
This was a major factor in the CrowdStrike crash that grounded flights, crashed laptops and briefly took Sky News off the air. CrowdStrike, which provides cybersecurity to 60% of Fortune 500 companies and most US states, updated its software in a way that became incompatible with certain Microsoft systems because they could not be easily updated in parallel under EU regulations.
Again determined not to curb failure, the EU passed the Digital Markets Act in May last year to target successful US tech companies doing business in Europe. This law is currently being used to force Apple to grant similar kernel access. For Apple, this would be a destruction of its entire brand, which depends solely on the reliability and interoperability of its products. Furthermore, it would actively harm consumers by taking away the only vendor that currently offers cybersecurity measures that can withstand a major cyberattack. Apple would be newly vulnerable to an event like CrowdStrike.
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The Digital Markets Act also serves as a mechanism for EU authorities to impose fines on Meta, Apple, Google and Microsoft. Although they don’t work directly for the EU, French regulators have made it clear that NVIDIA is next. Europeans aren’t developing technologies that provide the services these companies do, so European governments invite them to enter the market and then punish them for being the only players in their space, usually by demanding a payment in the billions for the privilege of serving their market. One begins to suspect that the real purpose of the law is a wealth transfer from US multinationals to the EU government.
The EU’s technology policy ultimately reflects the socialist, small-minded provincialism that prevails among Eurocrats. They make it impossible for ambitious Europeans to succeed, chase them to the US, and then jealously punish US companies for their success. US regulators could condemn our success stories to a similar fate by emulating these petty tyrants.
James Erwin, a native of Yarmouth, Maine, and with a BA from Bates College, is a Young Voices fellow working on free speech and technology policy in Washington, DC.
