“Europe-First”: Tech CEOs urge EU to ‘challenge’ President-elect Donald Trump’s ‘America-first’ approach – Times of India

Tech CEOs in Europe are calling for countries to take stronger action against Big Tech’s dominance and reduce reliance on the US for critical technologies like artificial intelligence, following Donald Trump’s electoral win, a report has said.
According to CNBC, at least two tech CEOs have urged Europe to adopt a “Europe-first” approach to technology. Multiple reports in the recent past have talked about Trump’s “America first” take that may lead up to policy changes, including increased tariffs on imports in a likely push to local R&D and manufacturing.

What Europe’s tech CEOs have to say

The report said that Andy Yen, CEO of Swiss VPN developer Proton, emphasised the need to reverse the trend of the past two decades, during which many of the Western world’s most important technologies, from web browsing to smartphones, have been dominated by a few large U.S. tech firms.
“It’s time for Europe to step up. It’s time to be bold. It’s time to be more aggressive. And the time is now, because we now have a leader in the US that is ‘America-first,’ so I think our European leaders should be ‘Europe-first’,” Yen told CNBC on the sidelines of the recently-held Web Summit.
Over the past decade, the European Union has taken legal action and introduced tough new regulations to tackle the dominance of large technology players, such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.
Yen also said that US Big Tech is playing ‘extremely unfairly’.
“Europe has been thinking in a very globalist mindset. They’re thinking we need to be fair to everybody, we need to open our market to everybody, we need to play fair, because we believe in fairness,” he told CNBC.
“Well, guess what? The Americans and the Chinese didn’t get the memo. They have been playing extremely unfairly for the last 20 years. And now they have a president that is extremely ‘America-first.'”
Meanwhile, Thomas Plantenga, CEO of Lithuania-headquartered used clothing resale app Vinted, urged Europe to make the “right choices” to ensure the continent can “fend for ourselves” and not get “left behind.”
“If you look very realistically at what countries do, they try to take care of themselves and they try to form coalitions to be stronger themselves, and as a coalition be stronger,” Plantenga told CNBC.
“We need to ensure that we can take care of our own safety, that we can take care of our own energy, that we ensure to keep on investing in our education and innovation so that we can keep up with the rest of the world,” he stressed.