Meet three incoming EU lawmakers in charge of key tech policy areas

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The European Union looks to have clinched political agreement on the team of 26 commissioners who will be implementing President Ursula von der Leyen’s policy plan for the next five years. A final vote is still pending next week, but on Thursday, Politico’s Brussels Playbook newsletter reported a deal in the European Parliament on the appointments, suggesting it’s “now all but guaranteed” that the next European Commission will kick off on December 1.

We’ve picked out three commissioner-designates to watch for tech policy moves as the next Commission takes up its five-year mandate, which runs into 2029, with responsibilities across areas like digital infrastructure and tech investment, support for startups, and enforcing the bloc’s laws on Big Tech.

Teresa Ribera Rodríguez

Executive vice president for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition

Big Tech will be watching Teresa Ribera Rodríguez closely. Once confirmed in post, the Spanish center-left politician is set for a major EVP role in the incoming Commission heading up a climate brief-cum-economic transformation EVP role. But she’ll also be taking over competition enforcement from Margrethe Vestager — a portfolio that’s given the likes of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta plenty of headaches over the years.

This combined strategic portfolio makes her the most powerful figure in the incoming Commission — on paper, at least.

The EU has put a fresh focus on trying to rein in platform power in recent years, thanks to the bloc’s flagship Digital Markets Act (DMA), a popular competition reform that came into force this March. It responds to Big Tech’s market-shaping muscle by applying a set of upfront rules on how they can operate key platforms, doing things like banning self-preferencing and requiring openness and interoperability, which the EU hopes will result in fairer dealing for competitors and tech users.

Von der Leyen has previously said enforcement of the digital regime is a priority for her second term as EU chief.

As EU competition chief, Ribera Rodríguez is set to wield major decision-making power in tech. She will inherit a clutch of active DMA investigations, including advanced probes of Apple and Meta, where the EU has already said it suspects breaches but isn’t expected to decide the cases until next year. Google’s self-preferencing is also under investigation. Other DMA probes could follow on the seven designated gatekeepers, with Reuters reporting that Amazon will face a probe next year.

Penalties under the DMA can reach up to 10% of global annual turnover or more for repeat offenders. But we’ve already seen notable operational changes as tech giants have been forced to offer stuff they can frame as compliance, such as Apple allowing web distribution for iOS apps and Meta creeping toward “less personalized” ads.

Expect a lot more service reconfiguring as enforcement steps up, though, and Ribera Rodríguez brings down the DMA hammer.

She will also be in charge of classical competition enforcement, which (while typically slower to yield results) has similarly beefy sanctions for violations — an area where the EU recently slapped Meta with a fine of nearly $840 million for tying its online classified ads service to its dominant social network, for instance.

Again, the Commission has a number of open cases that Ribera Rodríguez could end up being in charge of wrapping up, such as a long-running probe of Google dominance of the adtech stack. The EU previously said it may need to consider breaking Google up if its suspicions of anticompetitive behavior are confirmed. Such a significant call may ultimately rest on Ribera Rodríguez’s sign-off.

Faster enforcement, fewer killer acquisitions, strategic state aid reforms

Speaking at her confirmation hearing in the European Parliament, where Ribera Rodríguez was questioned by MEPs (members of the European Parliament) earlier this month, she said she’s committed to working on a reform of EU competition policy to further speed up enforcement and wants to improve the Commission’s ability to enforce the DMA.

The commissioner-designate also said she will focus enforcement on the worst offenders and pledged to clamp down on acquisitions that prevent innovation (i.e., killer acquisitions), suggesting Big Tech M&A will continue to face a bumpy ride in the EU with knock-on implications for startup exits (and investors).

In her own mission letter to Ribera Rodríguez, von der Leyen similarly named “killer acquisitions” and DMA enforcement as key competition priorities, so her confirmation hearing was on script here, instructing the chosen competition chief to “address the challenges and dynamics of digital markets, including platform economies and data-driven business models,” and urging “rapid and effective” DMA enforcement.

The EU president has also overtly aligned goals for the green and competition briefs, saying the EU needs a new approach to competition policy that aims to foster scale-ups that can help the bloc decarbonize faster.

Additionally, von der Leyen wrote that geopolitical uncertainty must be factored in and competition policy should “reflect the growing importance of resilience in the face of geopolitical and other threats to supply chains and of unfair competition through subsidies.” She asked Ribera Rodríguez to oversee more simplification of EU State Aid rules to support efforts to boost the bloc’s competitiveness via what it’s calling “Important Projects of Common European Interest” (or IPCEIs).

Here competition policy is being seen as a key lever for supporting emerging tech in strategic sectors, like microelectronics, batteries, and next-gen cloud infrastructure. So the job is tasked with helping to shape a higher tech, more autonomous future for the EU.

Since the mission letter was penned, Donald Trump has been confirmed as the next U.S. president, further amping up unpredictability and trade risk for the EU. It will be interesting to see how the incoming competition chief uses antitrust powers as a bolster against external instabilities without, for example, being accused of acting politically/being anti-America by a transactional Trump administration.

Henna Virkkunen

Executive vice president for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy

As well as a tech-focused EVP portfolio, Henna Virkkunen is being handed responsibility for “Digital and Frontier Technologies,” meaning she’s set to get a key role in shaping the bloc’s approach to web technologies and AI, and a lot more besides.

But as well as the brief putting a focus on fostering investment to drive innovation and tech uptake — requiring her attention on areas like cybersecurity, digital skills, and infrastructure (and uptake of apps like the EU digital wallet) — her responsibilities span enforcement of existing digital rules. It will be interesting to see where the liberal-conservative politician brings her A-game.

In the case of AI, the EU adopted a risk-based framework for regulating artificial intelligence this summer (i.e., the EU AI Act). Enforcement is due to start from early next year — with additional compliance deadlines following in the months and years ahead — but von der Leyen’s mission letter puts much more emphasis on “boosting artificial intelligence innovation” than enforcing these freshly inked rules. So, when it comes to AI at least, it appears Virkkunen is being told to prioritize ecosystem growth.

Among first-order tasks she’s instructed with are helping get EU supercomputers fit for AI startups to use to train models; devising an “Apply AI Strategy” to boost new industrial uses of AI and improve public service delivery; and helping set up the European AI Research Council, which the Commission has said will “exploit the potential of data.”

Other areas where the EU is keen to boost “frontier” tech investment — and therefore where Virkkunen will be expected to move the development needle — include supercomputing, semiconductors, IoT, genomics, quantum computing, and space tech.

In a more explicit ecosystem-boosting measure, the EVP will be in charge of introducing an “EU Cloud and AI Development Act.” The bloc wants this to support SMEs by boosting computational capacity as it will be paired with an EU-wide framework to support innovative startups in gaining access to the compute to develop their tech.

All of this plays into the “tech sovereignty” theme of the portfolio, which von der Leyen has linked to the overarching goal of driving the bloc’s competitiveness.

Digital Services Act enforcement, and what to do about X?

The structure of Virkkunen’s portfolio means she will also take the lead on steering enforcement of the Digital Services Act (DSA), the sister regulation to the DMA. The DSA is an online governance framework that aims to ensure digital services do right by consumers by removing illegal content and not neglecting to enforce their own terms and conditions, with an additional layer of algorithmic accountability rules for larger tech platforms.

The bloc has a raft of open DSA probes that Virkkunen is likely to be seeing through to conclusion, including investigations of marketplaces AliExpress and Temu, as well as social media platforms Facebook and Instagram; TikTok; and X (Twitter). Penalties for confirmed breaches can reach 6% of global annual turnover.

So far the EU’s probe of X is the most advanced, with some preliminary findings announced this summer. But where the investigation finally lands should involve Virkkunen, who is taking up an oversight baton previously wielded by ex-internal market commissioner Thierry Breton, who made himself very visible indeed versus most of the rest of the Commission via some public clashes with X owner, Elon Musk.

When it comes to enforcing the bloc’s digital rules, Virkkunen has named protecting children online as a priority. During her hearing with MEPs, she committed to presenting an action plan on cyberbullying and said she would look into “systemic risks,” such as addictive algorithms.

Tackling “dark patterns” is also a task in her mission letter, with von der Leyen saying the EVP must work to combat “unethical techniques online” — including addictive design — and social media influencer marketing. Fixing issues with e-commerce is also on the list. So it’s a repeat of existing Commission DSA enforcement priorities.

Online disinformation is another clear area of focus, which plays to the “democracy” component of Virkkunen’s EVP title. And this always-tricky issue could create some of the biggest risks for the EVP.

Notably, an instruction from the EU president to “work to counter harmful disinformation” is all but certain to bring the bloc into fresh into conflict with Musk, whose platform X contains hateful nonsense of all stripes. So how Virkkunen handles Musk’s inevitable attacks will be essential viewing, especially as the X owner now sits alongside President-elect Trump, bending his ear as a self-styled “first buddy.”

If the EU’s rule of law clash with X hits a crisis point next year, it looks set to be Virkkunen making the call on whether to pull the plug on regional access to the platform, as the DSA contains powers for violating services to be temporarily blocked in extremis.

Breton issued several public warnings of the power in a bid to rein in Musk. In the event, Breton himself is now out of power (after clashing with von der Leyen) and the X owner’s geopolitical influence has scaled exponentially.

The EU still hasn’t brought home the DSA probe of X it started almost a year ago, even as the bloc is now facing four more years of Musk-adjacent transatlantic turmoil. So Virkkunen is stepping into a complex (some might say toxic) brew in this particular case. Even as she’s been instructed to deliver “rapid and effective” DSA enforcement. “Lykkyä tykö!” (“Good luck!”) as the Finns say.

Ekaterina Zaharieva

Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation

Ekaterina Zaharieva is not an EVP, so hers is a much smaller portfolio, but as commissioner-designate for startups and R&D, she’s likely to become a familiar face in European startup land, and among the wider research community, over the next five years.

Among the tasks von der Leyen set for Zaharieva in her mission letter is to work on a “European Innovation Act,” which is slated to streamline the bloc’s regulatory framework; facilitate access to venture capital for “European innovative startups and scaleups”; and provide support measures for testing new technologies, such as regulatory sandboxes.

A perennial complaint from industry is that the EU’s love of rulemaking hampers homegrown startups versus unfettered global players, so von der Leyen’s policy plan is keen to sound active on ecosystem support measures.

For instance, Zaharieva has been asked to come up with an “EU startup and scale-up strategy” to help grow the local tech ecosystem. In her confirmation hearing, she talked about expanding access to funding and cutting red tape. But, clearly, the devil will be in the details of how she goes about executing those aims.

She will also lead on proposing a “European Research Area Act,” which the EU hopes will foster research and innovation by supporting the free movement of researchers, scientific knowledge, and technology.

Expanding the European Innovation Council (EIC) and European Research Council (ERC) are other stated missions. In the case of the EIC, Zaharieva has been specifically tasked with helping to create a network of trusted deep tech investors to push for co-investment with the private sector to grow homegrown innovation. Elsewhere, she will be involved in getting the aforementioned European AI Research Council up and running, which is part of the bloc’s efforts to support growth in the AI ecosystem.

During her hearing in parliament earlier this month, Zaharieva also pledged to push EU member states to meet a 3% spending target on research and innovation, saying research and innovation must be at the heart of the bloc’s competitiveness agenda.

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