According to Salla, Big Tech rules should be left to the new administration entering the White House. “Big Tech should be regulated by their home continent … That needs to be done in the US first and foremost.”
President-elect Donald Trump has been vague about how he would regulate Big Tech, suggesting “something” should be done about Google but implied breaking the company apart may go too far.
Salla’s critics are troubled by the way her arguments overlap with Meta’s. Bram Vranken, a researcher at Corporate Observatory Europe, a charity that tracks lobbying, points to an open letter, signed by 49 industry figures including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and hosted on a Meta website, which echoes Salla’s position that AI companies should be able to use Europeans’ data to innovate.
“She has an agenda which is very, very close to her former employer,” he says. “It’s bad for trust in EU politics, when somebody who used to be a lobbyist goes to the Parliament to repeat the same talking points.” Salla maintains that her time at Meta did not change her views.“I was talking about digital regulation for a decade before I joined Meta,” she says. “I have absolutely no ties to that company … It’s a great company—and I don’t have any of their stocks.”
Salla sits among more than 700 fellow MEPs. Yet past debates over tech policy show that just a few outspoken MEPs can shape laws, says Vranken. “So if she plays it right, she can also have quite an important influence on the political stance [her group] the EPP takes.” German MEP Andreas Schwab, an advocate for the Digital Markets Act who has been among the most prolific EPP members on Big Tech until now, told WIRED in March the new rules should prompt the European internet to “change for the better.”
Over the next five years, Salla expects one of her greatest challenges to come from suggestions that the EU needs more tech regulation, to plug gaps in existing rules. “That worries me a lot,” she says. In Brussels, people are already proposing a digital fairness act as an answer to problems ranging from addictive phone design to dark patterns and influencer marketing. Salla, however, believes the EU should focus on enforcing existing regulation, not proposing new rules.
“We need to have a stable investment environment for our companies,” she argues, “where we are not changing the rules and legislation all the time.”