Trump, Musk, and tech policy
The merger of Silicon Valley's power with state authority could become the ultimate test for Europe’s digital future
This column was originally published in MIT Tech Review Germany on December 19, 2024
This time, I didn’t make the same mistake. In 2016, I went to bed early, hoping to get some sleep before flying to the US the next day for a transatlantic tech-policy fellowship. When I woke up to an email from my boss that began with the line ‘In times like these…,’ I immediately knew Trump had won the election.
The mood was grim when the plane touched down at JFK. Post-it notes on the subway served as impromptu post-election therapy for people who were shaken and afraid. Over the course of the week, I met with think tanks, cybersecurity experts, and teams from all major tech companies in Silicon Valley. At the White House library, I spotted Trump’s The Art of the Deal prominently displayed in the new arrivals section—a fitting symbol of the moment.
The only people who were openly celebrating the result were members of an enterprise business lobby in D.C. Trump’s corporate tax cuts surpassed their wildest dreams. Meanwhile, in my group of tech policy experts, we debated whether social media companies had done too little to combat targeted disinformation and polarization - a topic that had rarely been discussed in US media before November 2016.
Eight years later, the world feels unrecognizable. The idea that platforms had a responsibility for the outcome of the election due to negligence or inaction, seems almost quant. Today, Elon Musk openly campaigned for Trump and is now part of the new administration, while continuing to collect billions in government contracts. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has already threatened to withdraw U.S. support for NATO if the EU moves forward with regulating Musk and his platform X. Meanwhile, Trump has promised to revoke Biden’s “woke” Executive Order on AI—the U.S. flagship framework for safe and trustworthy AI.
What we’re witnessing is “a merging of Silicon Valley’s power with state authority”, coupled with good old deregulation thinly veiled in “anti-woke” culture war rhetoric. Both will likely shape global tech governance for years to come.
If 2016 was a wake-up call to confront the health of the digital public sphere, 2024 must be a wake-up call to tackle the dangers of concentrated power in tech. As economics 101 teaches, concentrated industries are harmful—not just to democracy, but to the economy itself. Concentration stifles innovation, growth, wages, and productivity while fueling inequality. The post-election landscape is not the root cause but a symptom of the transatlantic failure to curb the extraordinary concentration of tech power.
While the Biden administration has made commendable efforts in antitrust enforcement—suing Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta—and introduced an ambitious Executive Order on AI. Yet much of the policy has been framed through the lens of national security, viewing the U.S. in an arms race with China. This intertwines the interests (and dominance) of leading digital corporations with national security concerns.
Europe—the self-declared global tech regulator—has fallen into a similar dynamic.
In a decade of working on tech policy in Europe, I’ve seen a consistent failure to address root causes: despite passing extensive digital legislation, digital markets have become ever more uneven playing fields. The market for generative AI, for instance, is highly concentrated. While Europe has many start-ups, the chips and specialized cloud infrastructure they depend on are dominated by a handful of U.S. companies. The public sector continues to rely on Microsoft Office and Amazon Web Services instead of promoting European alternatives. As a result, Europe remains structurally dependent.
Europe needs a real vision for the future that goes beyond hollow slogans like “sovereignty” or “AI leadership.” We must ask ourselves: What kind of digital future do we want?
With far-right populism surging, the rule of law eroding, and civic spaces shrinking, the stakes couldn’t be higher for Europe. If we fail to get our act together, the digital future will be one of entrenched corporate dominance, worsening inequality, and weakened democracy. That’s why I stayed awake this time for the U.S. election on November 5.
