After rushing to impose the world’s most stringent rules on online privacy, artificial intelligence, and tech antitrust, Europe is experiencing regrets. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s new watchwords are competitiveness, economic growth, and regulatory simplification.
The Commission is scheduled to publish a Digital Omnibus on November 19. It looks set to propose pausing implementation of the AI Act for at least a year and relaxing privacy controls on data use. But the word “deregulate” will be absent. It remains taboo. The AI Act will not be junked. Strict copyright rules slowing AI data mining will remain. Some expected changes to the GDPR could even make it more difficult to conduct targeted personalized advertising, the economic lifeblood of the Internet.
Even as European policymakers acknowledge that the continent needs a radical shakeup to jolt its lagging economies, political opposition to radical change remains fierce. Europe’s digital laws enjoy widespread political support; many of them have been copied worldwide, reinforcing the much-vaunted “Brussels effect.”
Von der Leyen’s centrist coalition in Parliament has already launched a full-frontal attack against the Digital Omnibus simplification message. Social Democrats, Greens, and liberal groups sent letters of protest. The Greens called on the Commission to “reverse course and focus on actual simplification.” The liberals called some of the draft tweaks “extremely worrying,” and the Social Democrats expressed concerns about “the potential risks of deregulation and weakening of the EU’s carefully constructed digital legal framework.”
Civil society, digital rights groups, and trade unions reject any changes to the bloc’s data protection regulation (GDPR) and the AI Act. Consumer umbrella group BEUC slammed changes that it warned “lack legal precision, legal grounds, and appropriate input.”
Von der Leyen herself avoids the word deregulate, at least in part to avoid sounding inconsistent. She spent her first five-year term as Commission President presiding over a vast expansion of tech regulation, promoting the policies as a way to curb the power of the most powerful tech companies. It’s hard for her to reverse course and acknowledge that she made a mistake. Even before revealing the Digital Omnibus, she faced flak for rolling back a good part of Europe’s strict environmental Green Deal.
Von der Leyen also wants to avoid appearing to succumb to American pressure. President Donald Trump has doubled down on criticism of European tech regulation. He has signed a memorandum to defend US companies from what he calls “overseas extortion” and imposed retaliatory tariffs. FCC Chairman Brandon Carr has the new European speech rules in his sights, which he considers to be “censorship.”
Linguistic embarrassment aside, economics are pressing Europe to deregulate. Former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi made a clarion call for change in his blistering report detailing Europe’s fading competitiveness. He blamed the continent’s low economic growth on the slow uptake of digital technologies and put forward 383 recommendations for reform.
Yet a year after Draghi published his report, the European Policy Innovation Council reports a sobering scorecard. Only 43 recommendations (11.2%) have been fully implemented. Most remain “in progress.”
Even counting partial progress, the EU is only one-third of the way through Draghi’s agenda. The Digital Omnibus is designed to accelerate the adoption of a reform agenda. But simplification is no panacea. Sooner or later, Europe will need to deregulate.
William Echikson is a non-resident Senior Fellow with the Tech Policy Program and editor of the online tech policy journal Bandwidth at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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