Have you ever wondered why you’re asked to “Accept Cookies” upon accessing a website? It may seem like a meaningless, routine click of a button before performing your online shopping or checking the score of last night’s football match, but by accepting this offer, you are essentially giving the website consent to collect and use your personal data.
A website’s obligation to gain users’ consent is a product of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): a law which came into effect in May 2018 and became the global model for protecting citizens’ data privacy and security. In 2022, Brussels continued to display its leadership in data security through the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which ensures a fair and competitive digital market, and the Digital Services Act (DSA), which strengthens citizens’ fundamental rights online. The EU has emerged as the global leader in tech regulation, consistently prioritizing its citizens’ privacy, enforcing platform transparency, and protecting its democracies from cyberattacks.
However, for Silicon Valley and the Big Tech industry, the EU’s extensive regulations are frustrating obstacles in their efforts to consolidate an unfettered oligopoly over the digital space. In other words, an antagonistic relationship has developed between the EU and Big Tech, exemplified in December 2025 by the European Commission’s decision to issue a €120 million fine to Elon Musk’s X for violating the DSA, the first non-compliance decision under the tech regulation. Musk responded to this fine on X, writing that “The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people.” Musk has certainly built a reputation for outlandish social media outbursts, but his comments on the EU highlight the reality of the situation: the Big Tech elite have an unwavering interest in weakening Brussels and its digital regulation.
The tension between the EU and Big Tech is nothing new. Palantir Technologies chairman and political svengali Peter Thiel stated in 2018 that Europe was punishing Silicon Valley out of jealousy. However, the American tech lobby has been markedly emboldened by Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office in January 2025, as Washington has since championed domestic tech deregulation and attacked the EU’s digital rules. In December 2025, Washington issued a visa ban on 5 Europeans, including the man behind the GDPR, Thierry Breton, for supposed censorship and coercion of U.S. tech companies. Subsequently, the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, wrote on X that “for far too long ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish [the] American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.” While Trump and his administration lambast the EU from across the Atlantic, Big Tech has identified its ally on the continent–the European far-right.
Right-wing populists began to establish themselves in mainstream European politics after the 2015 refugee crisis, which provokedwidespreadsocialunrest and demonstrated the inability of EU member-states to collectively respond to the crisis. Since then, support for anti-immigration policies have only risen, along with the popularity of the far-right. While the interests and beliefs of European far-right parties vary according to national contexts, there is a general agreement across this network of political actors that the EU is led by a network of globalist and technocratic elites who weaken national governments and promote immigration from countries that are culturally incompatible with European- Christian values. These ultranationalist parties — including France’s National Rally (RN) and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) — typically emphasize nativism, illiberalism, and the preservation of “traditional” values. While populist ultranationalists already hold positions of power in East-Central European countries such as Hungary and Czechia, the unsettling ascent of the far-right in Western Europe serves as a serious threat to the existence of the EU.
America’s Big Tech elites have cunningly thrown their support behind the European far-right, as the populist parties’ ambitions to reinvigorate the nation-state would inevitably weaken the EU’s jurisdiction to regulate tech. Musk has been very public about his political allegiances, making speeches at far-right rallies, such as one held by the AfD and its leader Alice Weidel in January 2025, and arousing anti-immigrant sentiment on X, a platform, which he uses for personal propaganda. Others, such as Thiel, are more subtle about their efforts; the co- founder of PayPal seemingly acts through U.S. Vice President JD Vance by grooming and financing Vance’s political career. In his infamous speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, the vice president declared that his paramount concern for Europe was “the threat from within” and critiqued the German “firewall,” which describes the refusal of all major political parties to work with the AfD. With the far-right gaining increasing popularity in Europe, the Big Tech network is seizing on the opportunity to hop on the anti-immigration bandwagon as a way to achieve its dream of a deregulated Europe. This may seem ideologically and morally void for an industry that used to be regarded as rather liberal and that’s because it is. Promoting inclusivity and diversity is no longer in style. However, political opportunism is not the only explanation for Silicon Valley’s ideological shift.
Mostly limited to fringe blogs and online forums, various radical far-right political philosophies started circulating around Silicon Valley during the mid-2000s. One of these doctrines came to be known as the “Dark Enlightenment,” which is most commonly associated with Curtis Yarvin, a software developer who envisioned an anti-democratic future where political power resided in dictatorial CEOs who would run states like for-profit corporations. Yarvin’s aspirations to dismantle liberal democracies resonated with the technolibertarian circles of Silicon Valley, who contend that untethered technological innovation will inherently lead to the most efficient and profitable form of governance. Back in 2010, Thiel gave a speech during which he said, “maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people … through technological means, and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”
As the global liberal order is at a breaking point, Yarvin and his ideas are no longer on the fringe. The Dark Enlightenment and other techno-utopian streams of thought have captured the psyches of some of the most influential figures within the tech industry and beyond. In some corners of Silicon Valley, it is not mere business interests that motivate the support for the rising European far-right, but an ideological goal to eliminate the EU and everything it stands for. The prospects of Yarvin-style corporate monarchies popping up in Europe may be low, but the threat of tech companies completely subverting governments is a real concern.
The alliance between Big Tech and the far-right exists because they share a common enemy. They are both interested in undermining the EU for different reasons, but these differences illustrate a critical weakness in their alliance. On the one hand,far-right politicians frame their legitimacy around the notion that they are protectors of national sovereignty, striving to return political power to the people. On the other hand, Silicon Valley is interested in removing EU regulations for the sake of increasing people’s dependency on their services. A system without digital rules will lead to an inescapable situation where people will unknowingly generate wealth and power for the tech oligarchy with their every digital action. Collaborating with Big Tech to bring down the EU could culminate in the far-right’s nationalist dreams, but it would simply replace Brussels’ so-called technocrats with the biggest technocrats of them all, creating a much more sinister arrangement than the one that preceded it.