Lately, I had the chance to attend the European Data Summit 2026 hosted by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Berlin. The program was packed with the who’s who of European think tanks, universities, and representatives from the EU Commission, as well as French and German ministries.
And then, there was the elephant in the room: Big Tech.
The entire first day revolved around how past regulation has failed—and how policymakers are still struggling to apply the rules that could actually work. The Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are not enforced well, key provisions remain too vague, the AI Act might get postponed, and meanwhile US social media giants are blamed for harming children and eroding political discourse.
So far, nothing surprising.
Then came what sounded like a Big Tech ad
One panel stood out: “Market Power in European Finance: Who’s in Control?” It brought together Rupert Schaefer from BaFin, Johannes Ehrentraud from the Bank for International Settlements, Thomas Weck from Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, and Carolina Melches from Finanzwende, and was moderated by Elisabeth Nöfer of Stiftung Mercator.
Listening closely, you could have mistaken parts of the discussion for a Big Tech pitch:
👉 “Our administration is the opposite of Big Tech. We think in silos, whereas these companies build unified, seamless experiences.”
👉 “Big Tech bundles features—including financial services—and partners smartly.”
👉 “They cross-subsidize across the bundle to create near-perfect services.”
All of this is true. These companies are relentlessly focused on their users. They observe behavior, identify needs, and build products that are simple, intuitive, and frictionless. Often free. Almost always easy.
A missed learning moment
For a brief moment, it felt like the room might shift into learning mode.
What could public administration take from this?
- Maybe: building government services that actually feel like services.
- Maybe: designing across silos instead of reinforcing them.
- Maybe: accepting that digital success often requires massive upfront investment—and the willingness to take risks, like US capital currently does in the AI space.
That would have been an interesting conversation.
Then the old mindset kicked in
But that wasn’t the conclusion. Instead, the takeaway was: we need to contain these business models. Ringfence them. Develop new rules to limit their expansion into finance and beyond. In other words: force the companies that gave us seamless mobile payments (think Apple) or easy peer-to-peer transfers (PayPal) to behave more like traditional incumbents.
That may be a bit unfair—after all, a regional institution like Sparkasse Rheda-Wiedenbrück never had the capital to compete on a global scale. But that’s exactly the point.
Tech does reward risk
Technology markets move fast. They reward scale, risk, and speed. They are built for disruption.
Companies like Zoom or Anthropic show that it’s always possible to rise quickly—even in markets dominated by incumbents. Sometimes because they are incumbents and systemically suffer from the innovator`s dilemma that makes them slow, fragmented, or constrained by legacy structures.
Success in tech is not just about good ideas. It is about execution at scale—and that always requires capital, risk tolerance, and the ability to cross-subsidize until a product truly works.
If I had one wish
I know that Europe needs regulatory support and many of these debates are necessary. But what I would wish for is a serious learning phase:
- What actually works in tech? What doesn’t?
- Why do certain products achieve global adoption while others never leave their home market?
- How do startups like Black Forest Labs not just become unicorns—but globally dominant platforms that can fund the next wave of innovation?
If we took these questions seriously, we could focus regulation on what regulation should actually be for: mitigating the real negative externalities of Big Tech—regardless of where it comes from—like protecting children from the harms of social media.
