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At a “Summit on European Digital Sovereignty” in Berlin on Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron, joined by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, gave an impassioned speech calling for Europe to free itself from the digital dominance of the US government and American tech giants.
“If we want to protect our democracies, [we have to] regulate the content of these platforms. Let’s be much more demanding. Don’t believe for one second the so-called ‘free speech agenda’ [of the Trump administration and US tech giants]. For me, we don’t speak about free speech when the algorithm is hidden and in the hands of very few players who don’t implement the laws decided by the citizens of a country. This is the wild west, not free speech.”
“If we want digital sovereignty we will have to protect our children and our democratic space,” he said. It followed his recent observation that, “we were very naive to leave our public space to social media networks controlled by US or Chinese companies that don’t share our interests and are not interested in the survival of our democracies.”
But in the same Berlin speech, Macron backed the German chancellor’s call to fall in line with the demands of the American government and US tech giants by stopping the entry into force of the EU’s AI Act passed last year. That law is the world’s first and only comprehensive attempt to establish rules for what can and can’t be done with artificial intelligence. The following day, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen quietly put forward a proposal to delay and weaken the AI Act – exactly as demanded of her by US President JD vance when he came to Paris in February.
“It’s extraordinary that at the very moment France and Germany are hosting a summit on European digital sovereignty, Ursula von der Leyen is bowing to pressure from Trump and Big Tech in Brussels, announcing the biggest rollback of EU tech protections we’ve ever seen,” said Ava Lee, Executive Director of the campaign group People vs Big Tech which protested yesterday outside the EU Commission headquarters (pictured above). “If Europe genuinely wants to govern itself, it has to start enforcing its own laws.”
Yesterday’s move by the Commission is expected to be only the first step in dismantling other EU tech laws such as the DMA, DSA and GDPR in an effort to appease Trump into dropping his tariff threats and maintaining the US security umbrella over Europe. Macron may say one thing in Berlin, but the truth is that he is quietly going along with von der Leyen’s moves in Brussels to erode European digital sovereignty – supposedly all in the name of Merz’s crusade against bureaucracy.
The Commission presented this “digital omnibus” yesterday as a technical adjustment with the intention of cutting red tape – insisting that EU businesses are demanding it. The centre-right EPP group and liberal Renew Europe cheered it. And yes, some European businesses have said that the AI Act will inhibit innovation in Europe and cede the AI race to the US and China. But it begs the question: Why did these same lawmakers design and vote for the AI Act last year (and herald it as a great triumph), but this year the law is suddenly horrible and onerous? There hasn’t been a change in EU government. Ursula von der Leyen’s centre-right EPP was in charge for the past five years, and they’re still in charge today. So what could possibly have changed since last year? Oh…right.
The fact is that even if the law does need to be adjusted, how can these lawmakers possibly explain why this needs to be done now and not one year ago when they were crafting the law? AI is moving fast, but not that fast. Yes, there are some European businesses saying the AI Act is bad. “It is about democratic responsiveness, not about yielding to external pressure,” insisted Business Europe Director General Markus J Beyrer yesterday as he celebrated the Omnibus. But why are EU lawmakers suddenly listening to him now rather than last year?
It seems fairly obvious that the main reason these adjustments are being made is because this was a demand of the US administration, expressed repeatedly over the past months including when President von der Leyen signed her ‘surrender deal’ with Trump at his Scottish golf course in July. Her proposal will (if approved by the EU Parliament – perhaps by using her new right-wing majority) delay the law’s implementation by at least a year and remove obligations on AI practices that had been classified by the law as high risk. These include facial recognition or using AI to assess people for things like loans or admissions.
Digital rights campaigners are horrified. “The Omnibus package unacceptably weakens the once proud EU digital framework and short-changes the EU, trading away robust guarantees for the uncertain promise of expedited competitiveness – a promise not built on evidence,” said Laura Lazaro Cabrera from the Center for Democracy and Technology.
“Years of hard work by civil society, trade unions and human rights defenders” is being thrown in the bin by what the Commission is doing, lamented Damini Satija from Amnesty International. “The EU’s ongoing deregulatory push will lead to a weakening of people’s rights and expose them to digital oppression. It will open the door to unlawful surveillance, discriminatory profiling in welfare and policing, strip people of their right to have control of their personal data and object to automated decisions, and the spread of harmful content online.”
German Green MEP Anna Cavazzini, Chair of the European Parliament’s Committee for the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, said there is no mystery where the impetus for these changes has come from:
“The EU must not deregulate itself into more US and Chinese dependencies. Let’s not get ahead of Trump’s vendetta against our digital rulebook. The Commission proposal for a Digital Omnibus would deliver personal and market data to tech giants on a silver platter.”
“The GDPR and the AI Act are land-mark EU legislation that are pushing back against unchecked power for digital corporations. They found a delicate balance between innovation and fundamental rights. Weakening them undermines our digital sovereignty, consumer protection, and fair competition.”
Centre-right and Liberal politicians yesterday were cheering the Commission’s move. “The Digital Omnibus provides much needed simplification of existing digital legislation,” said German Liberal MEP Svenja Hahn, who is from Macron’s Renew Europe group, saying it will “cut red tape and boost our digital economic growth so that Europe can become the leading AI and innovation hub in the world.” The centre-reight EPP group of Merz called the omnibus “a critical boost for Europe’s industrial competitiveness” which “strengthens Europe’s capacity to innovate and produce in a global market under pressure.”
Centre-left MEPs were less enthusiastic. Maltese Labour MEP Alex Agius Saliba called it an “unacceptable deregulation and weakening of the EU’s digital rules”:
“These policies have been put in place democratically to protect our businesses, people and their data. Rather than weakening the EU’s digital rules, we should enforce them and focus the Digital Omnibus on improving coherence, transparency and regulatory guidance without undermining the level of protection achieved so far.”
“The EU’s leadership in tech legislation is more important than ever considering the current geopolitical context where Big Tech companies and Trump are openly challenging our rules and regulations. We need to continue implementing our rules and protect our digital sovereignty, but also continue to inspire international partners in shaping their digital legislation.”
The extreme danger here is that this is sending very clear signals to the US that Washington has the power to veto EU legislation – and they’re not going to stop here. As University of Amsterdam Professor Natali Helberger told Politico yesterday: “A part of the message that Europe is giving to the rest of the world is that it is open to pressure from tech companies and other nations. I would say this harms the credibility.”
Back in February, US Vice President JD Vance crashed Macron’s AI Summit in Paris to give European leaders a dressing down for trying to regulate American tech companies – both publicly and privately in a closed-door meeting with President von der Leyen. In a speech at the summit he railed against EU attempts to regulate American Internet companies, slamming European “overregulation” and saying it amounted to government “censorship” of free speech. He suggested that the EU should dismantle the DSA and its accompanying General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which were “onerous international rules”. Rather than reacting with indignation to the US vice president coming to Europe and dictating to them what they can and can’t do with their laws, EU leaders were sanguine. Right after the von der Leyen–Vance meeting, the Commission dropped proposals on AI liability and messaging app privacy. Coincidence? If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Republicans in the US Congress have launched a full-on assault against the EU’s digital rules. The US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee released a report in July 2025 calling the EU DSA a “foreign censorship threat”. “European censors” at the Commission and EU countries “target core political speech that is neither harmful nor illegal, attempting to stifle debate on topics such as immigration and the environment”, it said. Their censorship is “largely one-sided” against conservatives, the report concludes. This is all being done after American big tech companies donated big money to Trump and Republican legislators during the 2024 campaign, and they’ve been lobbying the US government to use all tools at its disposal to dismantle the EU laws.
The White House is doing just that. Pressuring the EU to abandon its tech laws has been one of the key demands of Trump’s trade war extortion, and the White House seems to think the EU agreed to do it when they struck their July deal. The European Commission claimed after the deal that the EU’s tech rules remain unscathed after the agreement. But in a fact sheet published by the White House after the deal, the Trump administration said the EU had agreed not to go ahead with its plan to charge network fees to the largest online platforms in order to pay for Europe’s telecom infrastructure. The Commission was forced to concede that yes, they had agreed to that – but nothing more. That’s not what the White House seemed to think. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC right after the deal that the EU’s “attack on our tech companies” is “on the table” as part of the trade deal. Trump ally Jim Jordan, who chairs the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, said he also believes that was part of the deal during a visit to Brussels the following week, saying it is “a discussion item in the ongoing trade negotiations that the White House has with the European Union”.
In August 2025, Reuters reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed US diplomats in Europe after the surrender deal was sealed to launch a lobbying campaign to build opposition to the DSA. US embassies “should focus efforts to build host government and other stakeholder support to repeal and/or amend the DSA or related EU or national laws restricting expression online”, the leaked cable instructs. A Commission spokesperson said that “the censorship allegations relative to the DSA are completely unfounded” and “our legislation will not be changed, the DMA and DSA are not on the table in the trade negotiations with the US”.
Later that month, after a meeting with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Trump threatened more tariffs on the EU (despite the ‘trade deal’ supposedly limiting them to 15%) unless lawmakers revise EU tech laws – amid reports that the US government was going to sanction European lawmakers if they enforce the laws. In a Truth Social post in August 2025, just weeks after accepting the EU’s surrender in a deal guaranteeing a maximum of 15% tariffs, Trump threatened to renege on the deal and impose higher tariffs unless the EU changes its tech laws. “I will stand up to countries that attack our incredible American tech companies. Digital taxes, digital services legislation, and digital markets regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American technology,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Show respect to America and our amazing tech companies or, consider the consequences!”
The threats haven’t only been economic. Vice President JD Vance suggested during the presidential campaign in 2024 that the US should quit NATO if the EU tech laws aren’t changed – in the context of defending Elon Musk’s X. “What America should be saying is, if NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance, why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” he said in an interview with YouTuber Shawn Ryan. In that interview he falsely claimed the EU had threatened to “arrest” Elon Musk if they allowed Donald Trump back on X.
It is clear that this pressure is working on our European leaders. This isn’t just one act of surrender. It is a process of surrender and we are only at the start of it. We may get to a point where we will wonder why Europeans even bother making their own laws when the US can just step in and adjust them whenever it suits their interest.
“Some of these hard-won laws have yet to even come into effect, but the EU is already seeking to shift the balance of power from individual protections to corporate impunity, conceding to the profit-centric motives of tech behemoths who often operate at the cost of our rights,” lamented Amnesty International’s Satija.
“If the EU truly wants to support the smooth implementation of digital laws, including the AI Act, the GDPR, and other vital protections, it should strengthen existing safeguards and ensure that laws are meaningfully enforced – not dismantle the frameworks that currently hold companies to account and allow progress towards a rights-respecting tech future.”
