Let's play a game. Name one big tech company that came out of Europe in the last 15 years other than Spotify. Can't think of anything? That's because the European Union is a tariff cartel, squashing the innovative capacity of its member states, over-regulating US companies that manage to get in, and looting the EU coffers just to be safe. This has had disastrous consequences, the recent crash of CrowdStrike being one of them.
The EU is laughably behind the US, China and even India in technological innovation. This should not be the case. Europe is a developed economic continent with some of the best education standards in the world and a consumer market larger than the US.
Despite these benefits, the EU's anti-innovation technology policies are stifling economic production. Today's EU countries have seen their share of global gross domestic product halved since 1980. Determined to spread this misery, European bureaucrats have long imposed frankly absurd demands on U.S. companies seeking to serve consumers. Since 2009, Microsoft has allowed third-party software developers access to its kernel, under an agreement with the European Commission. This means that it is impossible for Microsoft to insulate its operating system in a way that strengthens its cybersecurity or provides consistent maintenance and upgrades.
“A Microsoft spokesman said the company had reached an agreement with the European Commission following complaints and therefore could not legally block its operating system as Apple could,” reports The Wall Street Journal.
This was the main cause of the CrowdStrike crash that grounded planes, crashed laptops and temporarily halted Sky News broadcasts. CrowdStrike, which provides cybersecurity to 60% of Fortune 500 companies and most US states, updated its software in a way that was incompatible with certain Microsoft systems because EU rules meant they couldn't easily be updated in parallel.
Determined not to let failure stop them again, the EU passed the Digital Markets Act last May, targeting successful US technology companies operating in Europe. This act is now being used to force Apple to grant similar kernel access. For Apple, this would devastate the company's entire brand, which relies on the reliability and interoperability of its products to the exclusion of others. Furthermore, it would actively harm consumers by depriving them of the only vendor currently offering cybersecurity measures capable of countering large-scale cyber attacks. This would make Apple newly vulnerable to events like CrowdStrike.
To read more from the Washington Examiner, click here
The Digital Markets Law is also a mechanism for EU authorities to impose fines on Meta, Apple, Google and Microsoft. Although they are not lobbying the EU directly, French regulators have made it clear that NVIDIA is their next target. Since Europeans have not developed the technology to provide these companies' services, European governments invite these companies in and punish them for being the only players in their field, usually by forcing them to pay billions of dollars for the privilege of providing their services to the market. I am beginning to suspect that the real purpose of this law is a transfer of wealth from US multinationals to EU governments.
EU tech policy ultimately reflects the socialist, parochial parochialism that pervades European bureaucrats: they make it impossible for ambitious Europeans to succeed, chase them to the U.S., and then jealously punish successful U.S. companies. If U.S. regulators follow the example of these vile tyrants, our success story may suffer a similar fate.
James Irwin is a native of Yarmouth, Maine, holds a BA from Bates College, and is a contributor to Young Voices in Washington, DC, working on free speech and technology policy.
