If EU tech rules of the past five years could take human form, they would embody Thierry Breton. The bombastic commissioner, with his mane of grey hair, became the public face of Brussels’ irritation with US tech giants, and last summer he visited Silicon Valley to personally remind the industry of looming regulatory deadlines.
Combative and outspoken, Breton warned that Apple had spent too much time “pushing” other companies out of the market. In a case against TikTok, he stressed that “our children are not guinea pigs for social media.”
His confrontational attitude towards CEOs themselves was visible in his posts on X. In the run-up to Musk’s interview with Donald Trump, Breton posted a vague but threatening letter on her account reminding Musk that there would be consequences if he used her platform to amplify “harmful content.” Last year, she posted a photo with Mark Zuckerbergdeclaring a new EU motto of “acting fast to solve problems”, a mockery of the notorious Facebook slogan. And in a 2023 meeting with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Breton reportedly got him to agree to an “AI pact” on the spot, before tweeting the agreementmaking it difficult for Pichai to back down.
However, in this week’s reshuffle of top EU jobs, Breton resigned, a decision that… alleged It was due to secret agreements between the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the French President, Emmanuel Macron.
“I’m sure they (the tech giants) are happy to see Breton go, because he understood that you have to hit the pockets of shareholders when it comes to fines,” says Umberto Gambini, a former adviser to the European Parliament and now a partner at consultancy Forward Global.
Breton will effectively be replaced by Finnish politician Henna Virkkunen of the centre-right EPP Group, who previously worked on the Digital Services Act.
“His style will certainly be less brutal and perhaps less visible in X than Breton’s,” says Gambini. “It could be an opportunity to reset and relaunch relations.”
Little is known about Virkkunen’s attitude to the role of big tech in the European economy, but her role has been restructured to fit von der Leyen’s priorities for her next five-year term. While Breton was internal market commissioner, Virkkunen will work with the same team but operate under the enhanced title of executive vice-president for technological sovereignty, security and democracy, meaning she will report directly to von der Leyen.
The 27 commissioners who make up von der Leyen’s new team, each responsible for a different area of focus, still need to be approved by the European Parliament, a process that could take weeks.
“Previously, it was very, very clear that the commission was ambitious in thinking about and proposing new legislation to counter all these different threats they had perceived, especially those posed by the big tech platforms,” says Mathias Vermeulen, director of public policy at Brussels-based consultancy AWO. “That is no longer a political priority, in the sense that legislation has been adopted and now it needs to be implemented.”
