silicon valley europe

Angela Merkel has urged Europe to seize control ofits data from Silicon Valley tech giants.... Her speech, at an employers’ conference in Berlin, shows the extent to which the information economy is emerging as a battleground in the EU-US trading relationship. It also highlights the concern in European capitals that the EU could be weakened by the market dominance of the big US tech companies, particularly in storing, processing and analysing data. Margrethe Vestager, the powerful EU competition chief who is now also to oversee digital policy, told the Financial Times last month that she was examining whether big internet groups could be held to higher standards of proof in competition cases, as part of a tougher line on dominant companies. Ms Merkel was speaking just two weeks after Berlin unveiled plans for a European cloud computing initiative, dubbed Gaia-X, which it has described as a “competitive, safe and trustworthy data infrastructure for Europe”. At the conference yesterday, Peter Altmaier, the economy minister, said the data of companies such as Volkswagen, and that of the German interior ministry and social security system, were stored on the servers of Microsoft andAmazon. He said 40 companies had signed up to Gaia-X, including Deutsche Telekom andSAP. But some business groups are sceptical. “While the intention to strengthen digital sovereignty is absolutely right, there are still bigquestions: such as, how do you combine so many different players in an effective way?” said Susanne Dehmelof digitallobby groupBitkom. In the past couple of years Ms Merkel has underscored the power of the US and China over data, contrasting the American approach — where big companies dominate the business of storing and processing data — with China, where the state exercises its vast powers to access the data of its citizens.