Laura Nordström: Big Tech EU lobbying: Structural power under Trump

Four American space firms, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, skipped the French President Emmanuel Macron’s space summit in Paris in September. According to Politico, this was done under the pressure of the US President Donald Trump’s administration. They had pressured the US firms to boycott the summit. Simultaneously, Trump’s administration has lobbied against the European Commission’s proposed EU Space Act, which would be a new way to govern EU space activities.

This is not an isolated event, but part of a general trend of Trump’s administration active pressure to impact EU legislation in cooperation with American firms. Transatlantic cooperation has increasingly turned into pressure. Also, in the field of tech policy, Trump has aimed at the key legislation of the first Ursula von der Leyen Commission, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Both regulate the core business of US Big Tech: the DSA regulates the online content of platforms and the DMA the abuse of market power of large tech companies. They are now being implemented as the Commission investigates infringements by gatekeepers and proposes remedies, while Trump considers the rules as unfair and has pressured the EU to abandon them, together with other US lawmakers. Indeed, the US Big Tech giants have entered a new era of EU lobbying with the second Trump presidency: they now exploit European dependencies on their private digital infrastructure with their ally in the White House.

Big Tech has become the biggest lobbying spender in Brussels. The Big Five, or GAFAM, Google (Alphabet), Apple, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, have more than tripled their combined lobbying resources to €23 million between 2013 and 2021, according to Corporate European Observatory and LobbyControl. This is due to increased path-breaking European platform regulation and its possible global impact that Anu Bradford has conceptualised as the “Brussels Effect”. In short, our research shows that Big Tech has become a very prominent EU lobbying actor both in Brussels and in member states such as Germany, France, Ireland and Luxembourg.

The 1990s and early 2000s were still a time of deregulation for the tech field in the EU. There was a belief that platforms would be beneficial for democracy and the reasoning on these issues, as on others, was based on economic thinking. There was no need for Big Tech to lobby widely.

However, from the 2000s to the 2010s Big Tech started to build their Brussels lobbying presence slowly by especially using their platform power, an asset that the other lobbyists do not possess. Indeed, it was a time of Big Tech’s use of their digital power resources that have been defined by Michael Kemmerling and Christine Trampusch as means and capacities, rooted in data and digital technologies and infrastructures, which enable actors who control them to reward and punish other actors. In EU lobbying, it meant targeting policymaking through the platforms’ algorithms and creating and exploiting policymakers’ dependencies on digital platforms that had become the space for political discussion in Europe.

Nevertheless, the political tide started to change as platforms and Big Tech in general became the target of criticism especially after scandals like Cambridge Analytica. The EU began to regulate the digital field through the 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the 2019 Copyright Directive and later through the von der Leyen Commission’s tech regulation such as the DSA and the DMA. Thus, in the 2010s and 2020s, Big Tech had to use all possible lobbying techniques: they invested in institutionalising their presence through traditional lobbying activities, such as meetings, networking, events and campaigns, but also in appearing “European”, as one problem for them was not having the leverage of being European. They participated and funded intermediaries such as business associations but also funded entities that appear as NGOs through astroturfing, an American style of lobbying. They recruited high-ranking officials through revolving doors and invested a lot in research to form the agenda. This pursuit of epistemic dominance and astroturfing, besides the lobbying through platforms, are specific traits of Big Tech EU lobbying.

These efforts had mixed results. The EU still adopted the DMA and DSA that aimed directly at Big Tech’s platform dominance. However, for example, the DSA followed many basic choices of the 2000 Electronic Commerce Directive, such as limiting the liability of the platform for third-party content, something Big Tech advocated for.

The second Trump administration sparked a new era of structural power for US Big Tech. They continue the more conventional lobbying techniques in Brussels but rely once again more on their digital power resources in alliance with the Trump administration. Until now, the EU has stood firm on the DSA and the DMA, but time will show how firmly in the time of deregulation and the weaponisation of the control of digital infrastructures that now occurs in a broader context of Trump’s foreign policy.