Today, we assume that regulation is rooted in the European psyche, builds on European values, and speaks to the role that Europe sees itself taking on the world stage.
If we focus on the last two decades, the rush to regulate seems accurate. As European rules on tech antitrust, digital privacy, and many other policies spread around the globe, Columbia University Law Professor Anu Bradford coined the term the Brussels Effect.
Widen the aperture, though, and the picture changes. Rewind to 1994 and 1995. Europe was early out the door in realizing that the Internet would, in fact, change the world.
The defining policy position of that time was the 1994/5 Bangemann report, named after Internal Market Commissioner Martin Bangermann. He recruited experts from European industry, academia, and politics to promote a European Internet policy that sounds alien to anyone who has been saturated in the last two decades of European regulatory discourse.
“Given its history, we can be sure that Europe will take the opportunity,” the report begins. It is worth reading that phrase again: “Given its history.” Historically, indeed, from the invention of the steam engine to the development of the revolutionary COVID-19 vaccine, Europe welcomed technological progress.
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This view of Europe as pro-regulation and anti-tech is a recent mind shift. Europeans can decide to shift into exploiting and using new technologies in ways that create durable competitive advantages. It is possible to see the recent regulatory push as temporary and return to the technological optimism that saturated the 1995 political climate.
Europe then was ahead of the US. The first real US policy report about the Internet came only in 1998, authored by then-Vice President Al Gore. If Europe was ahead of the curve, there is nothing that says that we cannot be ahead of the next technological wave.
For Europeans to become tech optimists again, they need to stop accepting ideas such as “the Brussels Effect.” It is a pernicious and destructive meme that suggests Europe should lean into regulation as its main export. Accepting and defending the idea that regulation is more of a priority than innovation, or that Europe relies on the safety-first precautionary principle for all new technologies, locks the continent into a self-limiting image as old, slow, and fearful.
The Bangemann report acknowledged the Internet’s risks — not that the new World Wide Web was dangerous, but that some Europeans would create a two-tier society of haves and have-nots, in which only a part of the population has access to the new technology. “The information revolution prompts profound changes in the way we view our societies and also in their organisation and structure,” the report reads. “This presents us with a major challenge: either we grasp the opportunities before us and master the risks, or we bow to them, together with all the uncertainties this may entail.”
What’s changed since 1995? Tech has become big and disruptive, as predicted, and Europe appears to have lost the ambition to compete on growth with the US. From 1995 to 2010, Europe focused on economic growth. It embraced digital. In 2000, the EU adopted an e-commerce directive that offered digital platforms extensive liability protection, similar to the US’s Section 230 of the Communications Act. The continent only turned to regulation around 2010 when it lost confidence in its own abilities to innovate.
When one listens to politicians today, it seems the biggest risk they are concerned with is that Europeans actually may have access to and use new technologies. Nothing in European history suggests such a fear. The Brussels Effect may be quite un-European.
Nicklas Lundblad is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. He has spent more than 20 years analyzing, shaping, and debating technology policy, most recently leading Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind’s work on public policy. His writings can be found at unpredictablepatterns.substack.com.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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