Opinion It is a nation’s first duty to protect its citizens from harm. A fine maxim, and one we can all agree on, even in these disagreeable times. Sadly, that’s as far as it goes. What the harm is and how to protect against it is where light turns to heat.
North Korea protects its citizens from harm by total control of what they can do, see, and think. They may starve, but they’re protected from a hostile world by an ideological ditch a light-year wide. On the other side of the geopolitical equation, members of the European Union, taking their cue from the devastation of fascism, protect their citizens through economic co-dependency among themselves and a polychromatic web of cultures under democracy and law.
Now add technology, specifically the digital tech that simultaneously sucks all the affairs of nations and citizens into cyberspace while removing the physical and tangible borders that define us in the first place. After heroic years of incomprehension, disbelief, and incredulity, the sovereign nations of the Earth have recreated themselves online, bringing their cultures, economies, freedoms, and restrictions, and recreating their old alliances of common interest and trust. Alliances, as always, involve gray areas where mutual interest and trust paper over cracks in actual alignment.
Microsoft unveils finalized EU Data Boundary as European doubt over US grows
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The best example of this is data privacy and protection. The US lacks an equivalent of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR – which still exists in a very similar form in post-Brexit UK legislation). American companies don’t have to give their users the same protection and transparency as EU-based companies must. But American tech companies underlie the majority of the digital economy worldwide. Fortunately, American law is powerful enough that US companies can voluntarily abide by EU norms through contractual agreement, so the EU is happy – no, that’s the wrong word – let’s say warily prepared to let them take control of EU citizen data.
Then Trump 2.0 happened. The administration is advancing some Constitutional innovations, most notably proposing that the courts cannot bind the President. The tech sectors of the EU and America have had to move rapidly from congratulating each other that Trump’s massive tariff spasm, rooted as it is in 19th century thinking, has no concept of services. Instead, a realization is dawning that nothing is sacred in America if the President pronounces it profane. That most certainly includes the policies of public and private organizations alike.
Thus we see Microsoft’s badly rattled Brad Smith promising to protect EU data in the US courts should Trump come after it, the rapid expansion of datacenters on EU power grids – sorry, soil – and the Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty. There’s no reason to doubt that he means all this; it’s not the quarter of Microsoft’s revenue he’s scared for, it’s the creation of plausible competition at nation-state scale. Both China and the EU have the resources to create software infrastructures to challenge the US; but only the EU is built of companies that speak English as their internal lingua franca.
But will it even happen?
Trump might mean it all, but can he do it all? The wild expansion of presidential powers over civil and criminal law has been fueled by a little outright defiance, seeing how much can be gotten away with, but mostly by creative bypass. The administration can’t abolish or replace legally mandated federal entities or private companies, but it can cripple them through regulation and defunding. This is done under the banner of the war against woke, whereby federal funding is contingent on policies mirroring Trump’s antipathy to diversity, equality, independent thought or real or imagined opposition.
In one example among many, the FCC, America’s communications and broadcast regulator, has said it will not approve mergers or acquisitions of any companies supporting “invidious” woke agendas. The overt politicization of a communications regulator is an ill-fitting shoe in a democracy. The UK’s populist Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, tried the same thing in 2021 with Brit comms regulator Ofcom by pushing ex-Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre as its head, but this was successfully defended against by institutional revulsion.
The tech sector is a lot less regulated than the broadcasters, but that’s not much protection against an administration determined to unroll as much of post-war liberal culture as it can, as quickly as it can, and with no thought of cost or consequences. Where global companies like Microsoft are going to see both cost and consequence is in the stark truth that what passes for the “invidious woke agenda” in Trump’s administration is just basic civil rights in Europe. Will Trump overlook that, or will it become a casus belli against tech? Nobody knows, and it looks as if Europe isn’t prepared to paper over that crack while there’s every chance it could become a chasm.
We already know that state support for cybersecurity in general comes a distant second to state control over data, with vigorous attacks on national security entities and vigorous support for DOGE doing what the hell it wants with everyone’s data. We know Signalgate signals the open gate at the heart of the administration on such matters. We know, practically, that the Salt Typhoonization of American infrastructure can only prosper now.
Truly, cybersecurity is a culture of teamwork, not a technology. That is now moot in the United States, where the wider culture is to destroy any teamwork of old if it conflicts with the febrile and fiercely fickle MAGA-lgorithm. This is simply not an environment where Europe can protect its citizens’ digital safety, nor can the shattered trust be quickly repaired. Microsoft and its giant tech confreres may fervently wish this isn’t so, but it is so. From Maine in the Atlantic to Florida in the Gulf, a silicon curtain is descending across the ocean. We may not see it lift in our generation. ®
