Saving the Internet in Europe: Fostering Choice, Competition and the Right to Innovate

This post is part four and the final part in a series of posts about EFF’s work in Europe. Read about how and why we work in Europe here.  

EFF’s mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world. While our work has taken us to far corners of the globe, in recent years we have worked to expand our efforts in Europe, building up a policy team with key expertise in the region, and bringing our experience in advocacy and technology to the European fight for digital rights.   

In this blog post series, we will introduce you to the various players involved in that fight, share how we work in Europe, and discuss how what happens in Europe can affect digital rights across the globe.  

EFF’s Approach to Competition  

Market concentration and monopoly power among internet companies and internet access impacts many of EFF’s issues, particularly innovation, consumer privacy, net neutrality, and platform censorship. And we have said it many times: Antitrust law and rules on market fairness are powerful tools with the potential to either cement the hold of established giants over a market even more or to challenge incumbents and spur innovation and choice that benefit users. Antitrust enforcement must hit monopolists where it hurts: ensuring that anti-competitive behaviors like abuse of dominance by multi-billion-dollar tech giants come at a price high enough to force real change.  

The EU has recently shown that it is serious about cracking down on Big Tech companies with its full arsenal of antitrust rules. For example, in a high-stakes appeal in 2022, EU judges hit Google with a record fine of more than €4.13 billion for abusing its dominant position by locking Android users into its search engine (now This article has been indexed from Deeplinks