The EU Holds a Regulatory Kill Switch to the Attention Economy

Or how the EU is on the cusp of killing Facebook and Instagram.

Less than one year into the second Trump term, we can see how the marriage between technocapitalism and American politics has been hugely favorable for BigTech and the country’s “homegrown AI” sector. Stock valuations and VC investments in AI are soaring. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently handed Trump a custom-made Apple plaque of 24-karat gold engraved with the President’s name and the text "Made in America", following the announcement of Apple’s new $100 billion investment in domestic manufacturing, on top of the $500 billion Apple has already committed.

Trump is a social media-kind-of President, seemingly crafted for the age of attention. His entertaining character and rhetorical style are a perfect match for the short-form video format, news headlines, trending social media posts, and virality in all its shades. If anything, Trump knows how to garner attention, good or bad attention - it doesn’t matter – because whoever gets people talking in the attention age, wins big.

While traditional allies of the US could dismiss Trump's first term as a one-off blunder, the second Trump term solidifies the fact that we live in a new era. An era where attention is the most valuable currency. An era that has been created by American BigTech and is defined by its lack of consistency or any pretense of order and structure. Moral values, community, real connections between people, and societal institutions that used to provide people with a sense of identity and belonging are sucked into a vortex where everything constantly changes form, and nothing matters besides the price on your attention.

Europe has been accused, for instance, in JD Vance’s keynote address at the 2025 Munich security conference, of suppressing free speech by censoring social media posts that express controversial viewpoints, false claims, or defamatory statements. Interestingly, the alternative to social media censorship appears to be worse. If people’s attention can be bought and sold without moderation, it opens the door to fascist propaganda and authoritarian control. Jason Stanley described this phenomenon in his book “How Propaganda Works” (2016).

“There is a simple and compelling argument, known since Plato, which would lead us to expect that even apparently robust liberal democracies are such in name only. The argument is as follows. A certain form of propaganda, associated with demagogues, poses an existential threat to liberal democracy. The nature of liberal democracy prevents propagandistic statements from being banned, since among the liberties it permits is the freedom of speech. But since humans have characteristic rational weaknesses and are susceptible to flattery and manipulation, allowing propaganda has a high likelihood of leading to tyranny, and hence to the end of liberal democracy.”

In this way, freedom of speech, an important democratic right, can ironically lead to the end of democracy.

The EU is facing a stark choice. On one hand, Europe’s territorial borders are threatened by Russian expansion, and it currently relies on the US for defense. On the other hand, we can safely say that the transatlantic partnership is no longer what it once was. President John F. Kennedy said about the EU in 1962, "The United States looks on this vast new enterprise with hope and admiration. We do not regard a strong and united Europe as a rival, but a partner”. In 2025, Trump told reporters, "Look, let's be honest, the European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That's the purpose of it, and they've done a good job of it. But now I'm president."

From a European perspective, the dependency on American information technology is not the convenience it once was but more of a liability. Namely, the American social media platforms that serve the interests of BigTech are an existential threat to the EU’s data sovereignty, strict data privacy laws, and constituent limitations on free speech. Either the EU pushes back with the means that it has, or it must accept that the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union is most valuable as training fodder for American AI models.

If the EU wants to set itself free from the attention economy, once and for all, it must ban targeted advertisement. I am not saying that it would be the right thing to do – necessarily - but in my view, it is the strongest leverage the EU has against Trump. Banning targeted advertisement would hurt American BigTech, but align with the principles of GDPR, free European citizens from foreign surveillance and manipulation, and effectively put an end to the attention economy in Europe.

In my paid analysis below, we shall see how the EU is moving slowly but steadily to a ban on targeted advertisement, with a focus on the regulatory measures against Meta. With ownership of Facebook and Instagram, Meta is the dark beating heart of the attention economy. The company disclosed in its earnings report from Q2 2025 that it earned $46.56 billion from selling ads, corresponding to 98% of its total revenue. Meta’s ads sale is based on an extensive user surveillance that - I have reason to believe – is irreparably violating European laws and ethical principles.

If the EU started to uphold the GDPR strictly and mercilessly against the American tech giants, I believe that Facebook and Instagram would no longer be able to operate in Europe. Other American tech giants would be in serious trouble too. Most obviously, Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, which earned approximately $71.3 billion from ads in Q2 2025, about 74% of its total quarterly revenue, based on targeted advertisement and some degree of user surveillance.