Newsletter No 20

Date: 27 February 2026

 

Big Tech guns for Europe’s digital rules

This month, Bram Vranken of Corporate Europe Observatory explained to Critical Takes how US Big Tech’s lobbyists in Brussels are trying to water down European digital regulations.

Bram gives a close-up account of how lobbyists operate in one of the world’s three biggest centres of corporate regulation. (The others are the US and China).

Bizarrely, the conservative legislator responsible for steering this digital deregulation through the European Parliament is a former lobbyist for Meta (paywall). Bram notes that Meta itself has been busily cultivating legislators from the European far right.

The bigger picture is that the European Commission – the main executive body of the European Union – is using a series of legislative packages known as “omnibuses” to water down EU social and environmental regulations on big business.

There’s no mystery about why this is happening. European business executives are panicking at the prospect of losing market share to Chinese firms and being hamstrung in the giant US market by Trump’s tariffs.

So they’re allying with rightwing European political leaders, who have an instinctive bias in favour of private capital, to weaken EU regulations which are claimed to be holding back “innovation” and making Europe less “competitive.”

The irony is that this “competitiveness” agenda is supposed in part to respond to Trump’s America-first bullying, yet US corporate interests have been able to exploit the EU's open door to lobbyists for their own ends. And not just Big Tech: US fossil fuel companies have also been working hard to hollow out the climate element of the EU’s big corporate sustainability reporting law.

The logic of deregulation is nonsense in any case. Allowing big business in the EU to dump more harms onto society and nature is not going to make its products and services more attractive to customers and will do nothing to answer by far the biggest threat to European standards of living, which is the visibly worsening climate emergency.

So this approach seems likely to fail in its supposed aim, but a lot of harm will be inflicted in the meantime.

Also on Critical Takes this month, researcher and former human rights advocate Katherine McDonnell reflected on her encounters with “corporate discursive power” – the efforts made by corporate interests to shape discussions about human rights in ways that benefit them and limit the scope of debate about redressing rights violations.

Against the rather gloomy background, I’m pleased to say that next month Critical Takes will feature an interview on a much more optimistic subject: the promise of public banks as a more democratic alternative to private investment.

Until then, good luck with your work!

Diarmid