An anti-Google protest banner hung outside a developer's conference in San Francisco. Photograph: Noah Berger/Reuters
Within the salons of the Elysée Palace, along the corridors of the European parliament and under the glass dome of the Reichstag, OldEurope is preparing for a new war. This is not a battle over religion or politics, over land or natural resources. The raw material that Paris, Brussels and Berlin are mobilising to defend is the digital environment of Europe's inhabitants; their enemies are the Silicon Valley corporations that seek to dominate it.
Coal, gas and oil powered the industrial revolution, but in the digital era, data is replacing fossil fuels as the most valuable resource on Earth, and the ability to collect and interrogate it has created organisations with a power that can at times seem beyond the control of nation states. Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google represent, in the words of Germany's economy minister Sigmar Gabriel, "brutal information capitalism", and Europe must act now to protect itself.
"Either we defend our freedom and change our policies, or we become digitally hypnotised subjects of a digital rulership," Gabriel warned in a passionate call to action published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine. "It is the future of democracy in the digital age, and nothing less, that is at stake here, and with it, the freedom, emancipation, participation and self-determination of 500 million people in Europe."
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