Ask most people why Europe keeps fining Google, dragging Meta to court, and writing thick privacy laws while America mostly lets its tech giants run free, and you will probably hear the same guess. Europeans are just more cautious, more bureaucratic, maybe even a little scared of technology itself.
That guess is wrong, according to a new essay published this month in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The piece, written by Enrique Dans, a professor of innovation at IE Business School in Madrid, argues that Europe’s suspicion of Big Tech has nothing to do with fear of technology. It has to do with memory.
Dans lays out three reasons why Europe learned to distrust concentrated tech power before the United States did, and the first one is the most unsettling.
For much of the twentieth century, large parts of Europe lived under regimes that turned personal information into a weapon. Nazi Germany, the Vichy government in occupied France, and later the Stasi secret police in East Germany all built their power on knowing exactly who their citizens were, what they believed, and who they associated with. When records like these fall into the hands of an institution with no real oversight, Dans argues, they stop being administrative details and become tools of persecution.
That history did not stay buried. When the Berlin Wall came down and Stasi files became public, ordinary people discovered which neighbours, colleagues, and even family members had been reporting on them for years. For an entire generation of European lawmakers, that discovery was not abstract history. It shaped how they thought about data for the rest of their careers. Privacy, in this light, is not a regulatory obsession. It is a defence that Europe learned the hard way, at a cost most other regions never had to pay.
It is worth pausing on why this matters so much for how Europe treats technology today. This connects to a real law, the General Data Protection Regulation, which forces companies to explain what data they collect and gives people the right to demand it be deleted. That law is often mocked outside Europe as excessive paperwork. Seen through Dans’s lens, it looks less like bureaucracy for its own sake and more like a society that once watched information become a weapon, now trying to make sure it never happens again.
The second reason is more practical than emotional. Europe simply does not have its own Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft to protect. Every major platform harvesting data from European citizens is headquartered somewhere else, mostly in the United States. That distance gives European regulators a clearer view of the imbalance at play. Foreign companies are extracting enormous value from hundreds of millions of people without those people having any real democratic say in how it happens. It is reasonable to think this cuts both ways: in America, regulating Big Tech means regulating homegrown giants that employ large numbers of American workers and carry real weight in American markets, which likely shapes how eager lawmakers there are to act.
The third reason is philosophical, and it goes right to the heart of how each side thinks about data itself. In the American tradition, personal data is often treated as a kind of property, something you can hand over through a contract, the digital equivalent of signing a form. Clicking “I agree” is treated as a fair exchange. Europe sees it differently. Under this view, personal data is closer to an extension of the person, not something that can be fully signed away by a click, especially when there is no real alternative to clicking it. You cannot meaningfully consent to something when refusing means being locked out of essential services.
Put these three reasons together and a clearer picture emerges. Europe’s tech regulations, however imperfect and however slow they can be to enforce, were not born out of technophobia. They were born out of a specific historical experience with what happens when power over information goes unchecked, combined with a structural position that made the risks harder to ignore, and a philosophical stance that treats personal data as part of a person rather than a tradeable asset. None of the three reasons works fully on its own. It’s the combination, history shaping instinct, structure shaping incentive, and philosophy shaping law, that explains why Europe moved first.
None of this means Europe has actually solved the problem. Its regulations remain far from perfect, and enforcement is often slow and inconsistent. But Dans’s essay makes an important point: Europe diagnosed the disease before most of the world even agreed there was one. The real question now, as artificial intelligence adds a new layer to how personal data gets collected and used, is how long it will take everyone else to understand why Europe was worried in the first place.
For a generation that grew up assuming the internet was simply “free” in exchange for handing over personal information, this history is worth sitting with. The trade never felt like a trade to most users. In Europe, it took living through the consequences of unchecked surveillance to see it clearly. Everyone else may still be catching up.
Quick note: I read “final script” as the finished article text (since we’d just wrapped the fact-check). If you actually meant the Hindi Reels script version for this piece, let me know and I’ll write that instead happy to do both if useful.
Subscribe Deshwale on YouTube
