It was a bitter and knowing laugh that rippled through the audience when it was announced that Finnish politician and former Meta lobbyist Aura Salla would no longer be speaking at an event in Brussels last month.
Salla had been scheduled to explain her vision as a new Member of the European Parliament to this audience of several hundred (mostly) Big Tech skeptics who had gathered for the Tech and Society Summit in October. But the crowd’s reaction to her last-minute decision to pull out—her team claimed she had a clash—pointed to the reputation that precedes Salla in the city.
Before she was elected, the 40-year-old Finn spent three years leading Meta’s public policy in Brussels, a job that entailed acting as the company’s public voice and attempting to influence new EU rules. She is not the only Meta alumnus to be elected this year (Hungarian MEP Dóra Dávid also worked in the company’s legal team). But for such a high-ranking lobbyist to turn MEP is an unusual situation which is, to some, deeply uncomfortable—even if no rules have been explicitly broken. Green MEP Alexandra Geese questioned publicly whether Salla’s group in Parliament now defends the interests of the electorate, or the interests of Meta.
Salla, however, insists her background makes her uniquely qualified to shape the bloc’s technology rules. Knowing how Big Tech business models function and how they use data, she argues, makes her more credible speaking on behalf of the tech giants’ European competitors. “I actually understand how these companies function,” she tells WIRED.
A member of the European Parliament’s largest group, the center-right EPP, Salla has been quick to establish herself as skeptical of what she calls Brussels’ “regulation tsunami.” That position has prompted alarm among her critics, who worry she will become Big Tech’s voice inside Parliament. “If I look at Aura Salla’s positions, they are quite close to those of the tech industry,” says Max Bank, campaigner at German campaign group LobbyControl. “That’s something I consider, to a certain extent, problematic.”
Campaigners have agonized for years about the so-called revolving door between the halls of power and the offices of Big Tech. Usually, people move in one direction: from politics to industry. The best-known example is the deputy UK prime minister, Nick Clegg, hired by Facebook to lead global policy in 2018.
By 2022, around three-quarters of all Google and Meta lobbyists in Europe previously worked at the European Commission, according to LobbyControl research. Salla once fell into this category, too. Her career in Brussels started at the European Commission before she was hired by Meta in 2020. The company did not respond to WIRED’s request to comment on this article.
Salla is worried that recently passed laws—like the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, or the AI Act—may be stifling potential European rivals to the likes of OpenAI or Apple. “We have very layered regulation on the tech sector, and that’s harming our companies,” Salla says.
The MEP does not oppose the aims of laws like the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which includes rules forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores onto European iPhones. “I hope that the DMA will be enforced so we can enable more companies to enter this field where Apple is—absolutely, I would love to see that,” Salla says. Yet she’s pessimistic the regulation will actually compel Apple to change. “I’m sorry, the company will go around it, go around it, go around it.” Instead, the businesses that will suffer, she claims, will be some of Europe’s most successful—travel company Booking.com and online retailer Zalando. “So, our own companies.”
Salla is becoming an outspoken figure, articulating concern that regulation went too far, too fast. She believes the EU should focus on boosting innovation at home over restraining companies from abroad. “We did it completely the wrong way around,” she says. European companies should be able to collect and feed their AI models data, Salla says, arguing companies are limited by “too many overlapping” rules. She stresses she is advocating for businesses to be able to use traffic and metadata—not private data—to train AI. “Even if [they are] not limited, it takes an army of consultants to make sure everything is correct,” she says.
Yet the companies publicly clashing with European regulations over AI training data have been the US tech giants. This year, Vienna-based digital rights group NOYB has filed legal complaints to try to stop X and Meta using Europeans’ personal data to train AI, arguing the companies were breaking European privacy law.
According to Salla, Big Tech rules should be left to the new administration entering the White House. “Big Tech should be regulated by their home continent … That needs to be done in the US first and foremost.”
President-elect Donald Trump has been vague about how he would regulate Big Tech, suggesting “something” should be done about Google but implied breaking the company apart may go too far.
Salla’s critics are troubled by the way her arguments overlap with Meta’s. Bram Vranken, a researcher at Corporate Observatory Europe, a charity that tracks lobbying, points to an open letter, signed by 49 industry figures including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and hosted on a Meta website, which echoes Salla’s position that AI companies should be able to use Europeans’ data to innovate.
“She has an agenda which is very, very close to her former employer,” he says. “It’s bad for trust in EU politics, when somebody who used to be a lobbyist goes to the Parliament to repeat the same talking points.” Salla maintains that her time at Meta did not change her views.“I was talking about digital regulation for a decade before I joined Meta,” she says. “I have absolutely no ties to that company … It’s a great company—and I don’t have any of their stocks.”
Salla sits among more than 700 fellow MEPs. Yet past debates over tech policy show that just a few outspoken MEPs can shape laws, says Vranken. “So if she plays it right, she can also have quite an important influence on the political stance [her group] the EPP takes.” German MEP Andreas Schwab, an advocate for the Digital Markets Act who has been among the most prolific EPP members on Big Tech until now, told WIRED in March the new rules should prompt the European internet to “change for the better.”
Over the next five years, Salla expects one of her greatest challenges to come from suggestions that the EU needs more tech regulation, to plug gaps in existing rules. “That worries me a lot,” she says. In Brussels, people are already proposing a digital fairness act as an answer to problems ranging from addictive phone design to dark patterns and influencer marketing. Salla, however, believes the EU should focus on enforcing existing regulation, not proposing new rules.
“We need to have a stable investment environment for our companies,” she argues, “where we are not changing the rules and legislation all the time.”
Source : Wired
