According to Sala, Big Tech laws should be left to the new administration that enters the White House. “Big tech should be regulated by their home continent … it needs to be done in America first.”
President-elect Donald Trump has been vague about how he would regulate Big Tech, suggesting that “something” should be done about Google but isolating the company could go too far.
Silla’s critics are troubled by the way his arguments overlap with Meta’s. Bram Wrinken, a researcher at Corporate Observatory Europe, a charity that tracks lobbying, points to an open letter, signed by 49 industry figures, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and posted on the Meta website. is hosted, which echoes Sala’s position that AI companies should be able to Use data from Europeans to drive innovation.
“He has an agenda that is very close to that of his former employer,” he says. “It’s bad for trust in EU politics, when someone who used to be a lobbyist goes to parliament to talk.” Silla says her time at Meta hasn’t changed her views. “I had been talking about digital regulation for a decade before I joined Meta,” she says. “I have absolutely no connection to this company … it’s a great company — and I don’t own any of their stock.”
Sala sits among more than 700 fellow MEPs. Vranken says that so far past debates on tech policy have shown that only a few articulate MEPs can shape the rules. “So if she plays it right, she can have a pretty significant impact on the political stance as well. [her group] The EPP takes over.” German MEP Andreas Schwab, a Digital Markets Act advocate who has been among the EPP’s most prominent members on Big Tech until now, told Wired in March that the new rules would make the European Internet should indicate “change for the better”.
Over the next five years, Sala expects one of his biggest challenges to come from suggestions that the EU needs more tech regulation to plug gaps in existing rules. “It bothers me a lot,” she says. In Brussels, people are already proposing a Digital Fairness Act in response to issues ranging from addictive phone design to deep patterns and influencer marketing. However, Sala believes that the EU should focus on enforcing existing regulation, not proposing new rules.
“We need a stable investment environment for our companies,” she argues, “where we don’t change laws and legislation all the time.”
