Madam Chair and honourable members, thank you for the invitation.
My name is Georg Riekeles. I worked at the European Commission for 11 years, notably on digital regulation and trade files. My current position is associate director of the European Policy Centre, one of Brussels' leading think tanks, but I emphasize that I am testifying entirely in a personal capacity.
In this introductory statement I would like to make three points: one, what I have observed; two, how I think we must understand it; and three, what I recommend.
My first point is what I have observed. My experience and encounters with the big tech platforms from inside the EU over the past 14 to 15 years suggest that EU policy-making is and has been in the grip of big tech platforms and their networks of influence.
I have sought to document this with regard to the EU's legislative debates on the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the DSA and DMA. As references, I've written a piece publicly about this in The Guardian called “I saw first-hand how US tech giants seduced the EU—and undermined democracy”, and then a longer piece in Medium called “TEKNOPOLIS: How Big Tech frauds EU democracy”.
It is true that the DSA and DMA will allow Europe, for the first time, to neutralize some of the harms caused by Internet platforms. However, it's also very important to be attentive that the compromises made in getting there in the end also reflect the extraordinary powers of tech companies to influence decision-making. We saw, under these legislative processes, campaigns of direct and hidden lobbying of a brazenness and scale that one should be very attentive to, and which in my view are totally out of line with the applicable codes of conduct for interest representation and the most basic behavioural principles in society.
As much of the debate in Canada has been on the Online News Act, I thought I should take two examples of such tech tactics from equivalent discussions in the EU in the context of the copyright reform directives from a few years back.
These relate, first of all, to the use of front groups and alliances. One example under the copyright debates deals with one of the most vocal stakeholder coalitions in Brussels, called C4C, the Coalition for Creativity, which represented all from public libraries to digital rights organizations. It turned out ex post that this coalition was financed by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, that is, financed indirectly by Google and other platforms. The coordinator was, by chance, also a consultant for Google.
Another example is an organization that is still active. It's called the European Independent Media Publishers. If you go to their website, it says that their the platform that represents over 1,000 media outlets across Europe. What this website did not say when it was created was that this is entirely set up and financed by Google. I discovered this when a consultancy company reached out to me and asked whether I wanted to do some hidden lobbying and think tanking for them. Since this has been called out, they have now added on their website that the European Independent Media Publishers is partnering with and is sponsored by Google.
Those are two examples of the use of front groups, alliances, and astroturfing.
The second major way of leveraging their power and gaining influence is, of course, using the powers that the platforms have directly. When the EU was trying to regulate user-generated content and confer ancillary copyrights on press publishers in 2018 and 19, big tech was directly corralling protesters to the barricades.
I can give you one example. YouTube's chief executive, Susan Wojcicki, crassly told YouTube creators in a letter that the legislation posed a threat to both their livelihoods and their ability to share their voices, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs and threatening the freedom of expression and the web as we know it. Of course, as we know, in the end the European Commission prevailed. The copyright directive took effect across Europe two years ago. I leave it to everyone to judge the substantiation of Google's dramatic warning that it would change the web as we know it.
How should we understand this? My own experience that I am pointing to here shines very well on what Bram was referring to in the Google memo leaked in November 2020 containing a list of tactics for undermining EU legislation. As the previous speaker also mentioned, it parallels big tobacco. As public scrutiny and research have uncovered in the case of big tobacco, outside vested interests create whole ecosystems of thought, influence and subversion to manipulate society and policy-makers.
I think it's very interesting to go back to the landmark study of the World Health Organization, “Tobacco industry interference with tobacco control”, which summarizes what these tactics can look like. We also see this in the area of big tech. It's about lobbying. It's about framing the narrative. It's about creating alliances and setting up front groups and astroturfing campaigns. It's about influencing or buying think tanks and academics. It's about hospitality. It's about political support and funding. It's using philanthropy. It's also about litigation and intimidation, and about the use of international pressure.
I see that the time is up, so I will end there. I can possibly come back to what I recommend in the questions and answers.
Thank you very much.