When Europe Becomes the Colony: Big Tech, Empire, and the Chokepoint Strategy

Big Tech, Europe, and the Fractured Imperial Core

To understand why U.S. officials like Vice President JD Vance are sounding the alarm over European tech regulation, we must move beyond the article’s shallow framing of “transatlantic disagreement” and situate it within the crisis of Western imperialism itself. This is not simply a bureaucratic squabble over data privacy or monopoly fines—it’s a manifestation of deeper fractures within the imperial core, as the U.S., EU, and their corporate oligarchies wrestle over the spoils of a declining global order.

Since the end of World War II, Europe’s integration into U.S.-led imperialism has depended on a delicate balance: subordination to American military and financial hegemony in exchange for a share of imperial plunder. But as U.S. unipolar dominance unravels under the pressures of multipolarity, that balance is breaking down. Trump 2.0’s technofascist recalibration is accelerating this rupture, shifting imperial strategy from alliance management to direct leverage and coercion. In this recalibration, Europe is not an equal partner—it is a subordinate chokepoint, a captive market, and a disposable ally.

The EU’s push for the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act is not merely about reining in corporate power; it is, in part, a tepid assertion of sovereignty over its own digital infrastructure. Yet even this limited effort threatens the U.S. imperial project because Big Tech is not just a set of corporations—it is the digital wing of the American national security state. Amazon powers Pentagon cloud computing; Google collaborates with predictive policing and AI targeting; Meta enforces censorship directives aligned with U.S. foreign policy. To regulate Big Tech is, at some level, to tamper with the imperial digital nervous system.

This is why JD Vance’s warning to European leaders at the Paris AI Summit struck such an ominous tone. His invocation of “censorship” and “industrial sabotage” is not the language of free-market defenders—it is the rhetoric of an imperial state guarding its strategic assets. For the U.S. ruling class, Big Tech is not a mere industry—it is a command-and-control platform for maintaining imperial influence over finance, communications, labor, and surveillance across the planet.

Yet Europe’s own contradictions block its path to independence. As we’ve previously analyzed in “The Atlantic Core Cracks” and “Atlanticism on a Leash”, the EU is trapped between the fantasy of “strategic autonomy” and the material reality of transatlantic subservience. Germany’s industrial collapse, France’s subsidy paralysis, NATO militarization, and the dollar’s financial chokehold keep Europe tethered to a decaying empire even as it pays the price for U.S. technofascist policy shifts. Regulation of Big Tech becomes a symbolic battleground in this crisis—a gesture of independence that collides with Europe’s structural dependence on U.S. capital, tech infrastructure, and military protection.

Meanwhile, the Global South watches closely. The same digital monopolies that Europe dares to regulate enforce neocolonial extraction in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. EU regulators offer no solidarity with the Global South’s struggles against data colonialism or digital dependency. Their reforms stop at Europe’s borders, refusing to challenge the imperial circuits that subordinate the rest of the world to Silicon Valley’s extraction and exploitation. In this sense, the EU’s regulation effort is not an anti-imperialist rupture—it is a parochial bargaining maneuver within the imperial hierarchy, aimed at securing a bigger slice of the monopoly rents without dismantling the system itself.

This is the deeper contradiction exposed by Politico’s article. It paints Europe as an overzealous regulator threatening innovation, while in reality Europe’s ruling class remains a junior partner in imperialism, unwilling to sever its ties to the empire even as it suffers under its domination. The U.S. lashes out not because Europe is breaking free, but because even modest assertions of sovereignty over digital capital threaten to destabilize the fragile architecture of Western imperial control. The fight over Big Tech regulation is not simply economic—it is geopolitical, ideological, and a symptom of imperial crisis.

Reframing the Conflict: Big Tech, Technofascism, and the Political Economy of Empire

To grasp the full stakes of this clash between Brussels and Washington, we must move beyond the narrative of regulatory overreach and trade disputes. What we are witnessing is the collision between technofascism—the fusion of monopoly capital, mass surveillance, and militarized governance—and the structural crises of imperialism’s core. The Politico article, like JD Vance’s speech, functions as ideological cover for a system scrambling to maintain its global digital dominion while its internal contradictions metastasize.

The Trump 2.0 administration’s aggressive defense of Big Tech is not a defense of free markets—it’s a defense of U.S. imperial strategy. As we argued in “The Great Betrayal”, the U.S. no longer views Europe as a partner but as a chokepoint, a subordinate territory to be leveraged, not cultivated. Europe’s attempts to regulate Big Tech threaten to disrupt Washington’s monopoly over the infrastructure of finance, communications, data, and surveillance—tools indispensable to its decaying imperial power.

Big Tech’s global footprint is not an economic accident; it is the operational backbone of imperial hegemony in the 21st century. The same platforms that extract European user data extract the Global South’s digital resources. The same algorithms that manipulate American political discourse shape coups, uprisings, and elections across Africa and Latin America. From Amazon’s contracts with the Pentagon to Google’s integration into NATO cyberwarfare planning, these corporations are nodes in a militarized, imperial digital order. When JD Vance defends Big Tech, he is defending the empire’s digital nervous system, not Silicon Valley’s bottom line.

Europe’s ruling class knows this, yet it lacks both the capacity and the political will to rupture. Its proposed regulations are not a step toward digital decolonization or global tech justice—they are attempts to renegotiate Europe’s place within the imperial hierarchy. Brussels wants a larger share of the rents generated by surveillance capitalism; it does not seek to dismantle the imperial circuits that make those rents possible. Europe’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are ultimately protectionist gambits dressed up as democratization: reforms designed to shield European firms from U.S. monopolies while leaving intact the broader structures of global digital domination.

And yet, even this limited assertion of autonomy triggers panic in Washington. This is because U.S. imperialism has entered what we identified in earlier analyses as the stage of hyper-imperial recalibration—an era when the empire no longer tolerates even minor insubordination among its junior partners. Just as Europe was forced to sabotage its own economy to sustain sanctions on Russia, it is now being disciplined for questioning Big Tech’s unrestricted dominion. JD Vance’s threats are part of the same imperial arsenal that coerced Europe into energy suicide, military dependency, and deindustrialization under Trump’s technofascist administration.

This is not a trade dispute; it is a disciplinary measure in an imperial system facing decline. Europe is not challenging imperialism—it is bargaining from weakness. And in the imperial periphery, nothing changes: African nations remain digitally colonized, Latin America’s data is harvested to fuel predictive policing and social control, and Asia’s tech sectors are blocked from sovereignty by U.S. export controls and sanctions. Brussels’ tepid regulatory efforts do nothing to challenge these imperial circuits; they merely attempt to secure Europe a bigger cut of the spoils while leaving the Global South’s exploitation untouched.

In this sense, Europe’s crisis is a mirror of imperialism’s broader crisis. Its ruling class cannot imagine a future outside the imperial architecture, even as that architecture cannibalizes European industry, sovereignty, and stability. Its reforms remain trapped within the coordinates of imperial loyalty, never daring to envision solidarity with the Global South’s digital liberation, never questioning the monopoly capital at the heart of technofascism.

And so the Politico article, the JD Vance speech, and the broader policy discourse are best understood not as democratic debates but as the ideological rituals of an empire in decay. Their purpose is to naturalize technofascist monopolies as inevitable, to demonize any regulatory friction as sabotage, and to foreclose any path toward dismantling the imperial digital order. To reframe this struggle is to see it not as a European rebellion or a transatlantic dispute, but as a symptom of imperialism’s inability to resolve its contradictions without deepening exploitation, coercion, and digital domination across the world.

Mobilizing Against Technofascism: Building a Revolutionary Digital Resistance

If the clash between Brussels and Washington exposes imperialism’s decaying center, then our task is not to cheer Europe’s regulatory squabbles but to chart a path beyond the imperial horizon. The contradiction is clear: neither the U.S. technofascist model nor Europe’s protectionist neoliberalism offers liberation. Both are competing managerial projects of global capitalist digital domination. Both extract, surveil, commodify, and police. Both defend empire’s monopoly over data, infrastructure, and knowledge production. To break their hold requires an organized, revolutionary movement—not to reform the imperial digital order, but to abolish it.

This is why the Global South remains the real battleground. While Brussels debates modest constraints on Big Tech, Africa faces ongoing digital colonization through extractive cloud infrastructure, exploitative AI training datasets, and outsourced surveillance systems. Latin America’s data is funneled through U.S. corporate servers, weaponized against popular movements. Asia faces a dual imperial squeeze: barred from sovereign tech development by U.S. sanctions, yet targeted for integration into Western-controlled supply chains. Any genuine mobilization must center these frontlines—not the intra-imperialist bickering of Europe’s bureaucrats.

The question is not whether Europe will regulate Big Tech, but whether any force will dismantle the imperial monopolies at their root. And this cannot be achieved through appeals to fairness, transparency, or “ethical AI.” It demands the revolutionary seizure of infrastructure, the decolonization of data, the abolition of capitalist property relations in digital space. It demands building dual and contending power in the digital terrain, creating networks, servers, platforms, and protocols outside imperial control, tied materially to the liberation struggles of the oppressed and colonized.

We must learn from the Zapatistas’ autonomous communication networks, from Cuba’s state-controlled internet sovereignty, from the radical hackers and pirate archivists who refused corporate knowledge monopolies. We must fuse their innovations with a militant political economy: one that names Big Tech not as an apolitical economic sector, but as the neural architecture of empire’s technofascist mode. Our struggle must be internationalist, rooted in solidarity with Palestine, with the Congo, with Indigenous peoples resisting digital dispossession from their lands to their metadata.

In this light, JD Vance’s threats and Brussels’ hesitations both signal the same impasse: imperialism cannot democratize its digital infrastructure because that infrastructure exists to surveil, discipline, extract, and dominate. We must not be seduced by Europe’s technocratic half-measures nor by America’s open authoritarianism. Our horizon must be abolitionist: the dismantling of imperial monopoly capital’s digital machinery, and the construction of a people’s digital commons, embedded in a revolutionary rupture with capitalism itself.

This work cannot be done by NGOs, policymakers, or corporate “ethics officers.” It belongs to revolutionary organizations, militant unions of tech workers, grassroots popular education, anti-colonial movements reclaiming technological sovereignty as part of national liberation. It belongs to a praxis that understands fascism not as anomaly, but as imperialism’s necessary violence; that understands technofascism not as dystopia, but as capitalism’s logical endpoint in crisis.

The Politico article signals imperialism’s nervousness. The JD Vance speech signals imperialism’s desperation. But neither signals an end. Only an organized, internationalist revolutionary movement can write that final chapter. Let us not waste time cheering the EU’s “independence” or mourning U.S. democracy. Let us build the dual power necessary to tear this imperial digital order down—and replace it with a socialist world where data, knowledge, and technology belong to the people.