Why Ireland is a big problem for Europe's tech rules

We're talking about legislative proposals like the tech sovereignty package, which is supposed to make Europe less reliant on American big tech companies, could potentially even shut the likes of Microsoft out of lucrative big public cloud contracts in Europe.

We're talking about revisions to the EU Cyber Security Act, which could also have the effect of shutting American companies out of certain European contracts.

We're also talking about Europe's big push to crack down on teenagers using social media, whether Europe sets an EU-wide minimum age for using social media.

And we're talking about the so-called EU Digital Omnibus, which I've talked about before.

I'll stick a link up there.

And that is essentially a big push to simplify the European tech rules in the name of competitiveness.

And that could effectively water down the General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR, which is Europe's big world-leading privacy law.

So in short, European lawmakers are working on a lot of very important tech legislation at the moment, which could have a huge impact on U.S. big tech.

But the problem is, Ireland, which is going to be setting the agenda for the EU Council, could slow things down, speed things up if it wants to.

Ireland is really, really close to big tech.

Let's go into the ways in which that is so.