National Review Online
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
‘The U.S. will in the coming months — that’s certain —
attack us over digital regulation,” predicted French President Emmanuel Macron.
This attack can’t come soon enough.
Europe long ago abandoned the idea that its economies
would ever produce important or competitive companies in the digital age. Apple
alone is larger than the entire German stock market. Instead, Europe has
decided to become a “regulatory superpower” and hopes to influence the
development of tech industries by setting policy. The most visible aspect of
this to Americans is that, when traveling in Europe, you need to click several
extra times to grant permissions to your own phone to load the websites you want
to visit.
National governments in Europe and the EU itself have
long simmered with hatred for Silicon Valley, which they see as having an
unfair tax deal at the EU’s periphery, in Dublin. They have responded by
engaging in bureaucratic hostage-taking, extracting enormous and punitive fines
from the likes of Facebook, Google, and X, under the implicit threat of
expulsion from the continent. The offenses are usually made up. X supposedly
had “misleading” verified checkmarks and “opacity around algorithmic recommendation.”
Google has been fined for acquiring potential competitors.
Europe is threatening to institutionalize and expand its
“regulatory superpower” framework with the Digital Services Act, which will
target what it defines as “Very Large Online Platforms” (VLOPS) of 45 million
active users in the EU. That means Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon, and X. Again,
only companies born outside of Europe. An ITIF report from last April made it clear that the EU’s
tech regulations amount to “a de facto tariff system” targeting American Big
Tech firms.
But it’s actually worse than this. The European
Commission and many national assemblies want U.S. tech companies to act as
political bodyguards and watchdogs for the European establishment. They want
the major platforms to act as censors, fact-checkers, and information
assistants. This is a project that has been abandoned in the United States.
Mark Zuckerberg initially, and stupidly, accepted responsibility for Donald
Trump’s 2016 election and for Brexit. He subsequently tried to manage the
political speech of over 1 billion users. This began furtively in Europe, with
his cancellation of pro-life ads in Ireland’s abortion referendum.
Since then, Zuckerberg has publicly repented of his
company’s post-2016 efforts to superintend the political speech of the globe
and readopted the internet’s original ethos of spreading free speech globally
through technology. Europe’s political class, however, still believes that it
can head off populist challenge or critique through censorship of the online
commons, banning speech critical of governments or of mass migration.
This clash of values, which Macron anticipates, is what
drove Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference.
Vance did not criticize Europe’s traditional speech restrictions on Holocaust
denial or the preaching of ethnic hatreds. His examples concerned the
criminalization of common political opinions about immigration or of Christian
prayer performed where authorities think it doesn’t belong. Vance was calling
Europe away from betrayal of our common civilizational values and warning that
our tech companies could not be misused as political weapons against democracy
itself. He was right then. We join him in urging Europe to turn back from its
censorial course, and in supporting America’s innovative tech companies in
their renewed commitment to democratic values — especially the robust freedom
of speech on which everything else relies.
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