But one of the few things Europe’s right-wing populists have in common with each other is their opposition to recent EU efforts to regulate the big tech platforms—efforts that have been driven by Europe’s centrist establishment parties. Some far-right leaders, like Italy’s anti-immigrant deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, are vocally opposed to these efforts on the grounds that they amount to censorship of the internet, and they are just as vocal in their outright praise for platforms like Facebook.

Others are simply Euroskeptics—nationalist politicians who wish to nullify the EU itself and tend to oppose any stringent, far-reaching legislation coming from Brussels—or market conservatives who tend to favor the rights of corporations. And many of them owe their rise to power at least in part to viral campaigns.

“When you look at the voting pattern of the right, and the populist parties of Europe in general, you can clearly see that they seem to resist this call—which is very much coming from the establishment—to govern or stamp some authority on Big Tech,” says Alberto Alemanno, a professor of EU Law at HEC Paris, a prominent business school. Many of them, says Alemanno, prefer the Wild West version of social media that allowed fake news—and far-right parties—to flourish. “That’s where they come from,” Alemanno says. Ultimately, the current online “ecosystem is what produced them in the first place, so they need to preserve it in order to exist.”

Which is all to say that the stakes attached to this week’s elections could be significant for Silicon Valley in some surprising ways. The European Parliament is a supranational institution with 751 elected members, called MEPs, drawn from the 28 European Union member states. When a piece of legislation like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—last year’s expansive EU measure to strengthen users’ data privacy—passes in the European Parliament, it then moves down to each state’s national parliament, which they then need to implement into domestic law. And the EU governing body has become a key legislative battleground for the likes of Google and Facebook.

“When it comes to tech, generally speaking, the European Union is the regulator,” says Alexander Mäkelä, a former Brussels-based Facebook employee who worked as a policy adviser on content issues and fake news, as well as public relations in the EU in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. “When it comes to international norms and standards, global norms start in Brussels."

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com