Different Histories, Different Rules
How America’s Rebellion and Europe’s Scars Produce Different Digital Rules — and Why That Can Be a Strength
This essay is part of my Toward a Trusted Tech Alliance series, which explores how democracies can move from fragmentation to common cause in shaping the digital future.
In my last essay, Outrunning the Dragon Means Running Together, I argued that fragmentation among democracies is not just inconvenient but a strategic liability that risks ceding ground to China. To understand how such an accord might be built, we must first understand why democracies, beginning with Washington and Brussels, see the digital world so differently. Their disagreements on privacy, platforms, competition, and artificial intelligence are not simply the result of bureaucratic turf battles. They are rooted in centuries of history, geography, and philosophy — legacies that continue to shape how each side regulates technology today.
I was reminded of how long such legacies endure while visiting the Istanbul Archaeology Museums. There I learned that in 1261, the Byzantine Empire signed the Treaty of Nymphaeum, granting the Italian city-state of Genoa control over Galata, across the Golden Horn from Constantinople, in exchange for naval support against Venice. Nearly 800 years later, that choice still echoes: Galata remains a hub of Western commerce in Istanbul, home to many of the city’s international hotels. History leaves long shadows — in geography, in commerce, and in governance.
The U.S.: Innovation First, Regulation After
America’s regulatory instincts were forged in opposition to monarchy. The Revolution embedded suspicion of concentrated state power, and the Constitution enshrined free expression as a defining right. In the digital realm, this legacy is visible in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields platforms from liability for user content, and in the absence of a comprehensive federal privacy law.
Many who came to America did so to escape the heavy hand of European regulation. Religious minorities — Puritans, Quakers, Mennonites, Huguenots — fled state churches and blasphemy laws. Families frustrated by primogeniture rules, which gave estates only to eldest sons, sought new opportunities to own land. Artisans and traders left behind restrictive guild systems and mercantilist controls that limited enterprise. In short, immigrants carried with them a deep suspicion of government regulation that stifled freedom, faith, and opportunity. This cultural inheritance reinforced America’s instinct to favor experimentation, markets, and individual liberty over state-imposed frameworks.
Federalism compounds this tendency. The U.S. began as 13 independent states loosely tied together under the Articles of Confederation, a weak framework that lasted from 1781 to 1789. When the Constitutionreplaced it, the founders deliberately embedded restrictions on federal power to preserve state prerogatives— a principle reinforced in the Tenth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, which reserves to the states or the people all powers not expressly delegated to Washington. That legacy endures: with authority divided between Washington and 50 states, sweeping national frameworks remain difficult to achieve.
Instead, regulation evolves ex post — after harms occur — through enforcement actions by agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and through litigation. States also legislate directly, as with California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). At the technical level, the U.S. often relies on industry-driven standards bodies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to set frameworks that regulators and companies adopt voluntarily.
The result is a system that prizes experimentation and scale. American firms can test, fail, and iterate rapidly — but often at the expense of stronger ex ante—before the fact— protections for citizens.
Europe: Precaution Born of History
Europe’s instincts run in the opposite direction. Centuries of monarchy accustomed societies to centralized authority. More recently, experiences of fascism, communism, and state surveillance left deep scars. Protecting privacy, dignity, and rights became not just policy preferences but enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Article 1 on human dignity, Article 7 on privacy, and Article 8 on data protection) and enforced by the Court of Justice of the European Union.
The EU embeds the protection of individual privacy in its founding documents, while the U.S. embedded protections for state sovereignty in its own. Europe’s commitments push Brussels toward harmonized, rights-based regulation; America’s constitutional design reinforces fragmented authority and a preference for market-led solutions.
This helps explains why the EU created the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the world’s first AI Act. These laws embody the precautionary principle: regulate risks up front to prevent abuse.
Institutionally, the EU is built on the logic of integration. Binding regulation is not only a way to protect citizens but also to harmonize the standards of 27 diverse countries. The European Commission thus plays a role more akin to a regulator-legislator hybrid than any U.S. federal agency.
The result is a system that prizes fairness, rights, and structural safeguards. European firms operate within clear guardrails, but often struggle to scale as rapidly as their U.S. counterparts.
The Underlying Philosophies
At heart, the difference is one of freedom as non-interference versus freedom as dignity and protection.
In the U.S., liberty means keeping the state out of your choices — hence permissive approaches to speech, data use, and experimentation.
In Europe, liberty means ensuring no actor — whether state or corporate — can dominate the individual. Hence stringent data rights, platform duties, and market fairness rules.
Complementary Strengths, Shared Goals
These differences can frustrate transatlantic cooperation. But they also reflect complementary strengths. The U.S. excels at rapid innovation and scale. Europe excels at embedding rights and trust. Both traditions are necessary if democracies are to offer the world a compelling alternative to China’s state-control model, which fuses innovation with surveillance and coercion.
Looking ahead, the U.S. will need to convince partners — and the wider world — that its more hands-off approach can still deliver trusted technology. Europe, meanwhile, must ensure that precautionary rules do not suffocate its own economy or constrain America in ways that allow authoritarian rivals to seize the lead.
Rather than dwell on divergences, the task is to synthesize strengths: combine America’s dynamism with Europe’s instincts for safeguards to project a democratic model of technology governance globally.
Looking Forward
The U.S. and EU will never converge on every rulebook. But they should at least converge on strategic essentials, including trusted cross-border data flows, AI provenance standards. Establishing such standards, not only among themselves but more broadly, is essential to ensure that the digital future is wired for liberty, not control.
History explains why Washington and Brussels regulate differently. Strategy demands they find ways to act together. Just as the Treaty of Nymphaeum left a Genoese imprint on Galata that persists to this day, the choices America and Europe make now about digital governance will shape the balance of power — and freedom — for centuries to come.
In line with my belief that responsibly embracing AI is essential to both personal and national success, this piece was developed with the support of AI tools, though all arguments and conclusions are my own.