Tech CEOs in Europe are calling for the EU to have a "Europe-first" mindset ahead of a Donald Trump presidency in the U.S., with the latter being very vocal about putting America first above everything else. The executives wish to push back and scale down the reliance on U.S. for critical technologies.
In October, during the Presidential election campaign, Trump said the EU would be paying a "big price" for not buying sufficient American exports if he becomes the next president.
During the Web Summit Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, different CEOs of tech companies in Europe expressed their anxieties over the perceived unpredictability of president-elect Trump, who has put forward an "America First" agenda as per Forbes.
CNBC reported that the victory of Trump was among the key issues discussed during the summit, eventually finding commonality among the executives to tackle the Big Tech's dominance in technology.
Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, developer of Swiss VPN, a virtual private network, believes that Europe must adopt a "Europe-first" thrust and reverse the dominance of U.S.-based firms on technologies, from web-browsing, to smartphones, and artificial intelligence, and therefore, "it's time for Europe to step up."
"It's time to be bold. It's time to be more aggressive. And the time is now because we now have a leader in the US that is America-first, so I think our European leaders should be Europe-first," Yen mentioned to CNBC at the sidelines of the summit.
According to Yen, Europe has been acting fairly, having a "very globalist mindset."
"They're thinking we need to be fair to everybody, we need to open our market to everybody, we need to play fair, because we believe in fairness," said Yen.
He then went on to underscore that China and America do not share the same mindset and accused the latter two as playing "extremely unfairly" for the last two decades, made worse by having president-elect Trump who is "extremely America-first."
Aside from Yen, another CEO who expressed the same sentiment was Thomas Plantenga, CEO of Lithuania-headquartered Vinted, a used clothing resale app.
Plantenga also encouraged the EU to make the right choices in order to ensure that the continent would be able to stand on its own and be at par with other continents.
"We need to ensure that we can take care of our own safety, that we can take care of our own energy, that we ensure to keep on investing in our education and innovation so that we can keep up with the rest," he added.
"If we don't, then we'll be left behind. In every collaboration, it's always a trade. And if we don't have much to trade, we become weaker."
Another key issue that was discussed among EU CEOs was the AI dominance, which is also concentrated in the U.S. considering that the heavily-used ChatGPT by OpenAI is also backed by Microsoft.
The European Union has been strengthening its position against the Big Tech by introducing new regulations and has also taken legal actions in order to chip away at the primarily U.S.-based dominant tech players.
The antitrust regulators of the EU are set to fine Apple under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) for alleged breach of tech rules. Brussels scored a victory recently when the EU's highest court in Luxembourg upheld a 2017 fine worth 2.42 billion euros against Google, for abusing its dominant position by favoring its own comparison-shopping service.
