Heads up, Silicon Valley. The new generation of lawmakers about to enter the European Parliament wants to come down hard on big tech companies.
Though the election is still a month away, the electoral list system used by most EU countries to select MEPs makes it possible to know who the biggest players in the next term will be.
When it comes to tech, the new crop includes a hard-charging group attuned to tech issues, having come of age as policymakers in an era of global privacy scandals like the Cambridge Analytica data leak, worries about cyber-enabled election-meddling and concerns about the economic dominance of a few digital giants.
They will be succeeding a cadre of more experienced EU lawmakers, pioneers who wrote policy on copyright, digital trade, privacy over the past five years and will not be seeking reelection.
The departing group includes center-right Luxembourger Viviane Reding, who launched the EU’s fight against roaming fees; German Greens’ Julia Reda, who dominated the copyright debate; Dutch Liberal Marietje Schaake, Estonian Liberal Kaja Kallas and others. British Conservatives’ Daniel Dalton and Labour’s Claude Moraes are headed for the Brexit (though the latter is planning to run in U.K.’s European election).
Platforms’ black list
At the top of the list “to watch” during the next five years is Facebook’s antagonist in Germany: Justice Minister Katarina Barley.
Barley leads the list of her country’s Social Democratic Party and has bashed Facebook repeatedly on the campaign trail, calling on the company to do more to protect its users’ data and saying, “I am not on WhatsApp, nor do I want to be.”
Echoing rhetoric from leading U.S. voices like Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, Barley calls Facebook and Google “monopolies” and advocates for interoperability to “open [them] up.”
The German Pirate Party’s top candidate, Patrick Breyer, is on a similar quest to take down Big Tech a peg. Breyer is slated to be Reda’s successor — a role that comes with high expectations, as Reda acted as a prominent influencer of the EU’s grand copyright overhaul.
Breyer has spent the past years leading a legal fight against alleged violations of the EU’s e-Privacy Directive, a law that is meant to protect confidentiality of communication and which is one of the outgoing Parliament’s unfinished pieces of business.”
Also in the Pirate Party family are candidates from the Czech Republic, where the party is polling to win up to five seats. Czech lead candidate Marcel Kolaja, a renowned IT specialist, said he wants to “pursue the efforts of German Pirate MEP Julia Reda to preserve the internet without censorship.”
Cybersecurity hawks and AI engineers
In France, left-wing candidate Manuel Bompard is an engineer currently working in an artificial intelligence startup that pledged to work on industrial policies in the European Parliament, as well as on research and innovation. Bompard is No. 2 on the France Unbowed list, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing movement, which is expected to come fourth in the election in France. His party’s program advocates for the transparency of AI algorithms and the localization of Europeans’ personal data within the EU.
The next European Parliament is also likely to zoom in on legislation countering foreign states’ use of technology for national interests as well as foreign influencing.
Two likely MEPs are keen to influence that debate, mostly by nudging Europe to take a more assertive stance against Moscow’s information war and other foreign states’ behavior online. They share a background in foreign affairs that lends them credibility to push back on Moscow.
In Poland, former Foreign Affairs Minister Radek Sikorski recently announced he is running in the election. Sikorski is a known transatlanticist and prominent Putin-critic who’s likely to grab headlines from his seat in the next European Parliament.
In Estonia, leading cyber diplomat Marina Kaljurand, a former foreign minister who also chaired the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, is running for the Social Democratic Party. Kaljurand is expected to lead the debate on cybersecurity, coming as she does from what is considered Europe’s tech-savviest country.
Kaljurand faces current Commission Vice President Andrus Ansip on the campaign trail — who, as outgoing vice president for digital affairs, will likely take up the baton of tech regulation in Parliament next.
Ansip was not overly enthusiastic about the Commission’s text on terrorist content that would force platforms to remove content within one hour. He has also been adamant about not reopening the 2000 e-commerce legislation, which ensures platforms are not legally responsible for the content they host.
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