The Globe and Mail - Canada must stand with Europe against U.S. Big Tech

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Giorgos Verdi joins Keldon Bester, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP), to argue that the Canada-EU Summit in Montreal should make coordinated action on reducing technology dependence on American tech giants a central goal of their alliance.

---

In an op-ed published in The Globe and Mail, Verdi and Bester set out the mutual challenges faced by Canada and the EU when it comes to tech dependencies and demonstrate how their route to escape from them may best be shared. Both have a close but increasingly strained relationship with a United States that continues to use threats of trade retaliation to undermine their efforts to gain technological sovereignty and break away from tech’s monopolised status quo.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s famous speech at the World Economic Forum in January 2026, where he called on middle powers to work together in order to counter “a rupture in the world order”. The “tech alliance” promised by Ursula von der Leyen should be a key first step in that endeavour.

Verdi and Bester set out the case for why responding to and diversifying away from the power of American tech platforms, cloud oligopolies, and AI giants should be the primary goal of the technology component of Canada and the EU’s burgeoning alliance.