Can we fix the digital transatlantic relationship?

WELCOME BACK TO DIGITAL BRIDGE. I'm Mark Scott, and this weekend marked May 4th — also known as Star Wars Day, for those who follow such things. This video plays in my head every time I have to explain the Star Wars basics to a non-fan.

For anyone in Brussels on May 15, I'll be co-hosting a tech policy gathering in the EU Quarter. We're running a waiting list, so add your name here and we'll try to open up some more slots.

— The transatlantic relationship on tech is in the worst shape in decades. Here are some ways to improve it — even if wider political tension remain.

— A far-right candidate won the first round of Romania's presidential election. Europe has not responded well to the digital fall-out.

— Media freedom has been significantly curtailed over the last decade amid people's shift toward social media for their understanding of the world.

Let's get started:

LET'S BE CLEAR: THE TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONSHIP on tech is the worst I've seen in 20 years. The White House has already made clear it views European Union digital regulation as akin to protectionist tariffs, as well as an unfair check on free speech. The Berlaymont Building — home to the European Commission — has struggled to secure high-level meetings for its digital officials whenever they've made it to Washington. It also has doubled down on internal efforts to promote European economic interests over those from outside the bloc via public funds dedicated to the next generation of emerging technology.

In short, Brussels and Washington are talking past each other. Even when United States and EU officials disagreed — as they often did — in the past, there was always an informal line of communication between policymakers to ease tensions. That came from individuals, on both sides, who had invested a significant amount of personal capital in building ties with each other. People met at conferences. They swapped cellphone numbers. They built professional, and sometimes personal, relationships with their counterparts in each respective city.

I wouldn't say those networks are completely gone. But they are certainly on life support. It has left the world's two most important democratic powers at a crossroads. And on digital policymaking, I'm seeing more and more signs that the EU and other parts of the democratic world (with the significant exceptions of the United Kingdom and Japan) now willing to distance themselves from their one-time trusted ally.

But after I outlined that theory a couple of weeks ago in Digital Politics, many of you got in touch with a fair criticism. We get things are bad, went the emails. But where are the areas of common ground that can keep the (digital) embers alive — even if the transatlantic fire looks like it's going out?

Fair point. It's easy to criticize. It's harder to offer solutions. So here goes.

First, one chess piece worth taking off the board. In many European capitals, there's a growing interest in working directly with US state leaders, most notably governors who have taken on an increasing leadership position on tech just as Washington has given up that role. I wouldn't put my eggs in that basket — even if that could include working directly with California on areas like artificial intelligence standards and international data flow rules.

As much as many would like to bypass the current situation in Washington (and I mean the wider morass of nothingness on tech, excluding the recent Take it Down Act that will likely be signed by Donald Trump), few, if any, foreign governments are willing to publicly push ahead with such US state-based digital diplomacy out of fear of negating decades-old international norms that national governments speak to other national governments on such foreign policy issues. Basically, working directly with US states is a non-starter for most non-US government officials.

OK, so where can we find common ground? Weirdly, antitrust policy feels like the most secure US-EU digital issue where both sides are forging ahead with a new collective consensus. Yes, the White House may not like the EU's Digital Markets Act (though it has remained mostly quiet about the recent fines against Meta and Apple, respectively.) And yes, many EU competition officials look at the decades of Washington's stalled antitrust investigations into Big Tech as a sign the US is too slow and/or too unwilling to act.

But in the last five years, there's been a growing consensus across the Atlantic that 1) parts of Silicon Valley have abused their market dominance; 2) consumers and smaller rivals have been unfairly affected by those actions; and 3) aggressive antitrust enforcement — including the potential break-up of some of these tech companies — is the only way to re-level the market.

If that doesn't sound like a first step toward a rekindled transatlantic relationship on tech, then I don't know what does.

Next, to the thorniest of topics: platform governance. Trump's aversion to European-style online safety rules is well-known. It was mostly shared by his Republican and Democratic predecessors in the White House. Brussels, too, hates the fact its internal media landscape is dominated by the likes of Instagram and YouTube.

But where both sides equally agree is that more needs to be done to protect minors for online predatory behavior, scams and potentially abusive content algorithms that have led to a series of EU and US efforts aimed at boosting digital child safety. Yes, this is not a like-for-like comparison. Some in the US have given parents too much control over what their kids can see on social media. Some in the EU want to impose age verification standards — in the name of child safety — that would fundamentally undermine how the current internet works.

But the basic premise — that children must be better protected as they navigate the online world — is an issue that both sides of the current transatlantic divide can agree on. What better way to maintain some form of ongoing EU-US relationship on tech?

The third area goes out to all the uber-wonks among us. Washington and Brussels should double down on the geekiest of digital technocratic standards as a means of bridging the political divide. That includes technical discussions that have thrived, for decades, in international and multi-stakeholder organizations like the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, or 3GPP, which sets global standards for telecommunications networks. Yes, I told you this stuff was geeky.

That would allow European and US officials — and, by extension companies — to continue talking, even if their political masters ratchet up the transatlantic trade dispute. It would also provide a greater level of certainty for American and EU businesses to invest in the digital world which is, according to both Brussels and Washington, an ongoing political objective.

So there you have it: competition, child safety and tech standards. Three areas that could be a foundation for ongoing talks and cooperation amid an increasingly geopolitical period. Runners-up tech topics also include: cybersecurity, defense and data flows. If you're interested in me unpacking those, let me know here.

The $64 million question is whether Washington and Brussels are willing and/or able to see beyond their short-term political fight to allow apolitical officials to continue the digital work they've been doing for years.

In normal circumstances, I would certainly hope so. But as anyone who has spent time in either Brussels or Washington this year will attest to, we're not living in normal circumstances. And even the hope of finding non-partisan digital topics upon which the transatlantic relationship can be rekindled feels more like a hope, currently, than a legitimate policymaking objective.

For some bonus content, here are my latest pieces for Tech Policy Press on how the US is pulling back from its global leadership on digital policy and how the EU is embracing its inner Trump, on tech, to Make Europe Great Again.

Chart of the Week

REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS, a nonprofit organization, compiles a yearly index that tracks five indicators — security, social, legislative, political and economic — on the health of countries' domestic media ecosystems.

The last decade has not been good. The chart on the left, from 2013, highlights that while the likes of China and Saudi Arabia scored poorly across the board, democratic states — including the majority of Europe and North America — were still viewed as "satisfactory" (the light orange color.)

Fast forward to 2025, and many of those democratic countries, including the US, have fallen (see chart on the right) into the "problematic" category (the dark orange color). That includes many parts of Central and Eastern Europe, too.

What happened in Romania? Take Two

AS DIGITAL POLITICS WENT TO PRESS on May 4, George Simion, a far-right ultra-nationalist politician, had won the first round of Romania's presidential election. The leader of the anti-vaccine Alliance for the Union of Romanians secured 41 percent of the vote — less than the majority Simion would need to win outright. He will now face a run-off, on May 18, with Nicușor Dan, the mayor of Bucharest, garnered 21 percent of the first round vote.

For the latest on Romania's presidential election, see here, here and here.

The reason Romania is holding a do-over on its presidential election is because of claims, during the previous vote in November, that pro-Russian politician Calin Georgescu unfairly used TikTok to woo voters in his unlikely first-round victory. The ultra-nationalist politician came out of the blue to top the first-round poll, and national regulators accused the China-linked platform of failing to uphold the country's electoral rules.

In an unprecedented step, Romania's intelligence services then released redacted documents (overview here) accusing foreign actors (they didn't mention Russia, but that was the inference) of conducting 85,000 cyberattacks on the country's election infrastructure. They also suggested there was a cross-platform influence operation involving pro-Georgescu Telegram channels that coordinated messages which people could then post to TikTok and Facebook. The spooks said similar tactics had been used in Ukraine — but, again, Moscow was never specifically mentioned in the redacted documents.

Not surprisingly, TikTok pushed back hard against accusations it had any role in Romania's last presidential election. It released a series of cherry-picked reports (see here and here) about how the platform had removed spam accounts, promoted authoritative information to voters and took down waves of false likes and follow requests.

In December, a senior Romanian court annulled Georgescu's presidential first-round win, in part because of the declassified intelligence documents. That same month, the European Commission opened an investigation into TikTok's role in the Romanian vote, focusing on how the tech giant may have failed to mitigate election-related risks. In February, Georgescu was placed under investigation for mostly potential campaign financing irregularities. And in March, he was barred from standing in this week's presidential re-run.

I get it. That's a lot to take in — especially for most of us who are not Romanian politics experts.

But what is central to the wider digital debate is that a presidential election of democratic European country was annulled based on unsubstantiated claims that one of the candidates had unfairly benefited from a social media campaign that, potentially, had ties to Russia. That then led to both domestic and EU investigations into campaign financing irregularities and the role of a foreign-owned social media platform in a European country's nationwide vote.

To date, no one has yet to be convicted of a crime. Brussels has yet to publish any evidence of TikTok's role in allowing a coordinated influence campaign to flourish on its platform ahead of the November election.

If true, both sets of accusations — related to Georgescu's alleged campaign financing issues and TikTok's role in the November presidential election — would be grounds for potentially annulling the first-round presidential election. And there is an argument that given the speed of events, local judges and the European Commission had no choice but to step in, even if no actual evidence had yet to be shown to a court to prove any of the accusations.

But my fear is that in annulling the first round election in November, and then barring Georgescu from standing in this weekend's vote, Romania's court has given ultranationalists and pro-Russian politicians an easy victory in the battle for hearts-and-minds.

Simion, another far-right ultra-nationalist politician, came first in the latest first-round presidential vote — and was closer to the 50 percent mark to secure an outright victory than many had expected. It's hard to argue there isn't a public groundswell of support for such opinions, now that similar pro-Russian presidential candidates have topped the polls in consecutive votes. And yes, TikTok was used again to communicate with voters. But its role in this weekend's election, based on what has been made public, was not significant compared to other means of reaching would-be supporters.

In jumping headlong into Romania's domestic politics, the European Commission also has over-stepped its role within the bloc's online safety regime, known as the Digital Services Act. Those rules do have a remit when it comes to election-related matters.

But by pulling the emergency cord in response to November's now-annulled election — via its ongoing investigation into TikTok's role in that vote — Brussels has made it easier for critics to claim the EU is willing to use its digital regulation to change voting decisions that officials in Brussels do not agree with.

I get it. That's not what is happening with the ongoing TikTok probe. But the perception for many on the outside is that the European Commission is weaponizing the Digital Services Act as part of efforts to nudge Romanians to vote against pro-Russian, far-right politicians.

That's just not a good look for the 27-country bloc as both domestic and non-EU influencers ramp up claims that Europe's online safety rules are an anti-democratic effort to censor online voices with whom it disagrees.

What I'm reading

— The Future of Privacy Forum breaks down all you need to know about South Korea's new AI regulatory framework. More here.

— Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined TikTok $600 million for failing to protect Europe's data via data transfer to China. TikTok's response here.

— International Association of Privacy Professionals explains why Colorado is reconsidering its approach to regulating artificial intelligence. More here.

— Researchers from the University of Zurich used AI-generated content in online discussions on Reddit to see if such content could change people's minds. The study received significant pushback for failing to gain consent of the people targeted by the AI-generated content. More here and here.

— The DSA40 Data Access Collaboratory published an in-depth FAQ on how Europe's online safety rules allow independent researchers to access platform data. More here.