Should Europe aim for its own Google?

Digital multinationals as a policy goal

The lack of European digital multinationals in the global economy has been a source of hand wringing in European digital policy discussions for a long time. As early as 2010, the European Commission lamented that “most of the recent successful internet businesses (such as Google, eBay, Amazon and Facebook) originate outside of Europe” (European Commission, 2010, p. 7).

More recently, this anxiety has featured in the debate on whether the rather intricate EU digital regulatory framework constrains private innovation, thus preventing European start-ups from becoming global giants. This debate was rekindled by a recent article by legal scholar Anu Bradford (2024) and the following social media discussion around it. In the paper, she argues that the conspicuous absence of European digital giants is not because of the thick EU rulebook but points to a host of other relevant factors that contribute to the relative disadvantage of European firms (among other things, finance market structure and the indignation of insolvency).

In this op-ed, I seek to question the assumption that the success of digital economy and policy is best assessed by counting how many digital multinationals a region has managed to give birth to. I bring up three sets of questions I think are problematically marginalised due to the focus on nurturing European digital behemoths.

Distribution in digital economy

The first set of questions concerns the distribution of wealth within a regional digital economy. The goal of incubating as many successful multinationals as possible connects with the age-old utilitarian objective of maximising the overall size of the (digital) economy. Often this is measured by the aggregate market capitalization of digital sector firms and visualised in graphs such as this one.

What is left out of the discussion is who might benefit from the emergence of European digital behemoths and who might not? Often these kinds of distributive questions are dismissed by a vague note on how the overall growth of the economy eventually lifts all boats (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999/2018, p. 13). Per this argument, nurturing digital multinationals is understood to benefit not only corporate shareholders and other obvious beneficiaries, but also society more generally — including its most disadvantaged communities.

However, this certainly cannot be presumed at least in the case of the digital economy. For example, in Europe the material benefits of the now dominant US digital corporations have so far flown back to California so unburdened by taxation that it has troubled even Union institutions (European Commission, 2016) and international organisations. (OECD, 2014) This effectively disables taxation as the traditional redistributive mechanism to which the all-boats-will-rise argument could cling to. While the OECD tax reform deal (Agyemang, 2023) could address this, its successful implementation cannot be presupposed (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2024), nor is it a panacea. Assuming that incubating as many digital multinationals as possible is the policy goal to pursue marginalises these problematic questions of distribution in the digital economy.

Imperialistic implications of global digital champions

The second set of disincentivised questions concerns the imperialistic undercurrents that the policy goal of creating global digital champions contains. Now that the global economic competition has also gained geopolitical significance, it is increasingly normal digital policy to seek to export one’s regional values globally via home-grown, privately developed, digital technologies. For example, the US has sought to secure steady data flows for its corporations from Global South to the US as a part of its trade policy (Couldry & Mejias, 2019, 105). Chinese corporations often place their infrastructure projects in other countries under the Chinese government’s Digital Silk Road policy umbrella that seeks to enhance China’s global influence (Choudary, 2020). Indeed, China has become more assertive in using Chinese corporations to spread technologies and services that are embedded with its social harmony ideals (that is, systematic surveillance and control) (Hillman, 2021). Thus, the urgent task of promoting freedom and democracy as a response to growing Chinese influence now seems to justify all sorts of geopolitical ambitions for Western digital hegemony.

However, as the EU has, so far, exported more digital regulation than digital technologies, this “Brussels effect” has already exposed the Union to criticisms of covert imperialism (Bradford, 2023, p. 59). Should European digital behemoths emerge, this criticism might apply to their global businesses as well. If the EU attempts to grow its own digital champions that could spread its values globally, it ignores the possibility that imposing European values on other parts of the world might be felt to be every bit as imperialistic as imposing Chinese values. For example, India has already rejected both US and Chinese corporate development projects that it viewed as threats to its digital sovereignty (Cohen, 2024). Striving for global influence through digital multinationals sidelines other countries’ right, particularly in the Global South, to develop their digital economies from the perspective of local values and culture in ways that enrich local communities.

Imagining more democratic digital economies

The third set of disincentivised questions concerns the re-imagination of alternative, more democratically organised, digital economies. The current digital corporations’ governance model relegates wider society to a mere audience for planning by the firms’ developers and their venture capital sponsors, who design these technologies within firms (Levitz, 2020). Often, digital multinationals have adopted a particularly exclusive corporate governance model where the dual-class share structure enables the centralisation of power within the corporation to its “founding fathers” (Aggarwal et al., 2021).

Structuring a European digital economy around different policy goals than the incubation of digital multinationals could open up space for imagining a more democratic digital economy. This would also mean a re-orientation of policy towards the hopes and needs of ordinary Europeans. As Bradford has also reflected, “it is not clear Europeans actually want a ‘European Google’ if that requires submitting to the company’s ‘surveillance capitalism’ in ways that compromise individuals’ fundamental rights to data privacy” (2023, p. 68). Thus, taking the current organisational models for granted can inhibit what social theorist Roberto Unger has called “institutional imagination” (1996) — our ability to envision new and more egalitarian governance arrangements for the European digital economy.

Pushing the envelope

Policy discussions have a habit of proceeding along the lines of persisting assumptions, which in turn then structure those debates. An implicitly shared goal can provide common ground which allows those debating to focus on the successful attainment of that goal — without ever being required to interrogate its ultimate desirability. For example, in the current European innovation vs regulation debate, this shared goal is that the EU should try to emulate the success of Chinese and US digital multinationals by nurturing its own corporate champions. My point here is not that debates on whether recent digital regulation inhibits private innovation are without purpose. But we must also examine the underlying assumptions of this debate, and challenging the ends of digital policy could open up new avenues for imagining the European digital future. What else might Europe want if not European Googles?