Why Europe must take on the broligarchs to build an internet that works for people

Our online lives are being shaped by giant, greed-driven corporations with no regard for people’s rights or welfare. It’s time to stand up to these Big Tech bullies. Michiel van Hulten is Director of Strategic Research (EU) at Reset Tech and a former Member of the European Parliament for the Dutch Labor Party (PvdA). He argues that Europe can push back by setting out clear and strong demands about the kind of online space we want – one that protects our safety, freedoms, and democracies.

The prospect of a forced American takeover of Greenland, though it appears to have receded for now, has shattered the notion of the United States as a reliable, friendly guarantor of European security.

The lesson for Europe’s political leaders is clear: Europe can no longer afford to be a passive bystander in its own economic and security destiny. It must heed the words of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in his widely acclaimed 2026 Davos speech: “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”

It’s time for policymakers to face the facts

Right now, the opposite is happening in Europe. Washington is using the ominous threat of military force and trade wars to demand concessions from its allies on a host of separate issues. Riding this wave of American coercion, Big Tech ‘broligarchs’ are executing a soft-power coup in Brussels.

The recent European Commission announcement of an investigation into X over the proliferation of non-consensual sexual deepfakes of women and children, generated by its AI chatbot Grok, highlights the consequences of tycoons who feel above the law. But it’s too little, and nearly too late.

The Commission and national regulators have soft-pedalled enforcement of the Digital Services Act for fear of upsetting President Trump and his Silicon Valley cronies. The new Digital Omnibus package, which seeks to weaken world-leading AI safeguards and data protection provisions under the guise of ‘simplification’, was drafted in this spirit of concession and accommodation. Times have changed. Any new legislation should be calibrated to hold US oligopolists to high standards of consumer protection, reducing their market power and enabling European competitors to thrive.

Putting foreign profits above people’s rights is a losing game

Meanwhile, far-right parties are on the rise in virtually every EU country, tapping into public anger over the high cost of living, public services that fail to deliver, and persistent inequality. Their narrative mostly relies on painting immigrants as the villains.

Progressives need to take on the real villains: the Silicon Valley moguls who are increasingly throwing their weight behind these far-right movements and tearing apart communities with radicalizing algorithms. Leaders of the democratic parties in Europe should reverse the long-standing position of deference to these companies, stop treating their leaders as statesmen, and start calling out the threat they pose to the core values and interests of the European people.

This doesn’t mean rejecting investment or seeking to slow innovation or technological progress. On the contrary, it means unleashing the creative energies of a competitive EU market by restricting the stifling dominance of a handful of actors. This is a moment of opportunity for a major surge in EU-led investment, innovation, and technological sovereignty.

The Big Tech lobby has long persuaded political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic that what is good for Oracle, Meta, Open AI, and Google is good for economic growth. This is a dangerous fallacy that puts government leaders on the wrong side of the majority of the people – not just in Europe, but also in the US. In poll after poll, the public holds these same companies in low regard, outraged by how they profit from public harm. It is Trump’s biggest political weakness, and one that Europe should exploit.

We need a different online world – but how do we get there?

The narrative of economic populism, often dismissed by the left as the domain of the far right, is the most potent tool progressives have to counter the current crisis. Economic populism works precisely because it reframes the debate away from abstract regulatory technicalities and toward a clear story of who is harming whom, and who benefits. It gives voters an identifiable villain (the tech billionaire) and a tangible promise (you will be safer and better off, both online and in the real world). It is time for Europe to start speaking the language of a progressive economic populism.

We should call for a technology revolution for the people, not the billionaires. This should include a focus on EU business creation through incentives for regional investment and ownership, procurement policies that create revenue for emerging EU players, and competition policies that force monopolies to create space in markets for new entrants.

We should call for real investment in jobs of the future, including education and vocational training, as well as higher wages and greater incentives to join professions that will not be displaced, such as nursing, social care, and construction.

We should create an AI dividend for communities requiring that any projects to build new data centers invest in improvements needed to the power grid (including transmission lines, power storage, and renewable energy production), as well as critical upgrades to water systems.

We should join forces with the creative community – including publishers, broadcasters, recording artists, and the film industry – to require fair compensation for hard-earned intellectual property that is now being appropriated by Big Tech.

We should prioritize stopping the danger to children. The Big Tech giants have exhibited a decade-long pattern of launching products targeting kids that are addictive and unsafe – often knowingly. We should promote an aggressive set of product liability laws to deliver such high penalties that it results in actual product change in the market.

The digital marketplace is rife with scams, violations of individual privacy, and attacks on our national security. We should conduct an aggressive enforcement agenda to crack down on these illegal activities, champion the causes of victims, and impose harsh penalties on repeat offenders.

We should champion a new movement for consumer choice – requiring companies to enable people to pick what they see in their feeds, understand why they receive content that they didn’t choose, and turn off the corrosive algorithms to recapture the organic experience of early social media.

A turning point?

In the words of Mark Carney, “we are in the midst of a rupture.” The Greenland crisis proved that the transatlantic alliance is now transactional at best and predatory at worst. But it also showed that when Europe decides to push back, it can win.

By embracing a principled economic populism, progressives can offer a vision of a protective Europe that defends its children, consumers, workers, and businesses from the whims of foreign autocrats and tech titans alike. The people are already there – it’s time for their leaders to catch up.