Don’t worry. No one is threatening to take away your access to Sweden-based Spotify.
An anonymously-sourced story in the Wall Street Journal contains the following claim: “The European Union’s executive arm is currently working on new legislation aimed at promoting tech sovereignty, according to officials familiar with the matter.“
When a major news publication anonymously posts claims about an event that has not yet happened—in this case a law propping up tech companies in the E.U. it’s appropriate to wonder why. After all, there might be commercial interests that want this somewhat limp threat published beforehand for purely cynical or self-serving reasons. But that doesn’t make the claim not worth contemplating.
Citing “officials and lawmakers,” the Journal says powerful people want to discourage “dependencies” on the U.S., in addition to helping their own companies, and they don’t necessarily want to “ditch” technologies produced by the Silicon Valley giants.
In and around the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland this past week, the issue on everyone in Europe’s mind was Donald Trump’s bizarre demand that the landmass of Greenland be handed to him on a platter by Denmark—and his threat to introduce tariffs against the E.U. countries that he feels are thwarting him—most of Northern Europe, France, Germany, and the U.K. Trump has apparently abandoned his most powerful bargaining chip in this standoff: the threat of actual war. That in turn may have been because the most powerful people in the world, bond vigilantes, sent a clear message to Trump that they didn’t want war over Greenland.
But while tensions were higher earlier this week, the E.
