POLITICO’s weekly transatlantic tech newsletter for global technology elites and political influencers.

By PIETER HAECK, ALFRED NG and VINCENT MANANCOURT

With EDITH HANCOCK and GIOVANNA COI

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WELCOME TO DIGITAL BRIDGE: This week it’s Pieter Haeck with you from Brussels, Alfred Ng from Washington, D.C., and Vincent Mananfourt from London. Mark will be back at the helm next week — though will be splitting his time between New York (April 2-3) and Seattle (4-5). If you’re around and want to grab a coffee, hit him up.

Here’s what’s on deck this week:

— How to spend two days in Leuven: We’ve got you covered as you prepare meetings and sightseeing for next week’s U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council in Belgium.

— The United States government sets its sights on reining in data brokers …

— … While America’s allies face pressure to follow the U.S.’s example in restricting data flows to political adversaries.

TRADE AND TECHNOLOGY COUNCIL, BELGIAN-STYLE

BELGIAN INNOVATION HUB GRAPPLES WITH NEW ERA OF GEOPOLITICS:[/b] Welcome to Leuven, the Belgian town east of Brussels hosting next week’s high-level political gathering of EU-U.S. trade and tech officials, the Trade & Technology Council.

Why Leuven? The town was picked by the Belgian government (currently chairing the European Union’s Council of Ministers) for its appeal to U.S. counterparts, especially on cutting-edge research and microchips.

It is home to KU Leuven, Europe’s leading university in areas like bioscience, medicine and cybersecurity; it’s also the No. 1 recipient of most EU-level innovation funding.

Crucially, Leuven is also the seat of Imec, arguably the world’s most prominent chips research center that has attracted attention in Washington and is reviewing its ties to China.

Oh, and it also brews a lot of beer, being the home base of the largest brewer in the world AB InBev.

ON RESEARCH SECURITY: With new EU plans to beef up research security and a busy U.S. agenda to review ties to China in industry and research across the Western world, Digital Bridge sat down with the head of the KU Leuven university, Luc Sels, to discuss how European universities were adapting to new geopolitical pressures.

Sels said the university had “a strictness that we didn’t have when I became rector in 2017″ to scrutinize prospective research collaborations. It has a longstanding boycott against Iran and a more recent one against Russia, but is also scrutinizing collaborations — in a “country-agnostic way” — through three committees reviewing human rights, dual-use and “knowledge security” risks.

That’s brought China increasingly to the fore. Just this month, the university refused three China-funded scholarships because they originated from defense universities and the research suggested had a strong dual-use character, Sels said.

He said the committees looked closely at China Scholarship Council funding (CSC) through which the Chinese government promotes international research collaborations. And, he added, his university does not work with Chinese defense universities like the Seven Sons of National Defence.

It’s a two-way street. Sels said Chinese counterparts, too, have increasingly told European partners that they don’t want to collaborate in sensitive areas of research like semiconductors and artificial intelligence. In a strange way, that has opened up easier conversations around cooperation in other areas like climate change, he said, cautioning not to cut off all ties to China as a rule because that would hurt Europe even more.

SCOOP — TTC DRAFT STATEMENT: POLITICO’s Clothilde Goujard and Camille Gijs saw a recent draft joint statement that leaders will present at next week’s gathering.

6G: In the draft, Washington and Brussels said they want to ramp up cooperation to fund secure telecom networks in third countries and develop an outreach plan with other allies to develop and commercialize 6G networks.

The two sides want to release a “6G vision” document, also seen by POLITICO, with a heavy focus on keeping the next generation of telco networks within the “trusted” suppliers group.

Chips: They also said they intend to organize more talks with like-minded countries on their use of Chinese semiconductors “in the near future,” and the EU wants to survey semiconductor companies on their use of lower-end Chinese microchips in supply chains related to national security and critical infrastructure.

POLITICO Pro technology, trade, energy and competition subscribers can find more here (EU) and here (U.S.).

What’s next for TTC? We flagged earlier that this edition of the council could very well be the last one, as both Europe and the U.S. head into elections and the leadership on both ends could look quite different thereafter.

A more recent version of the TTC draft joint statement text, dated March 26 and also seen by POLITICO, said “we have initiated reflections on the lessons learned about our cooperation so far.” But what future cooperation could look like hasn’t been agreed, and even that text could still change before next week’s gathering.

LEUVEN LOGISTICS: The meeting spreads over two days, Thursday April 4 and Friday April 5.

Who’s there? The official Commission calendar has Executive Vice Presidents Margrethe Vestager and Valdis Dombrovskis as well as Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton down as attending. Belgian Foreign Affairs Minister Hadja Lahbib is also attending from the EU side. From the U.S. side, it’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Trade Representative Katherine Tai.

Thursday: Vestager and Dombrovskis have different side events on Thursday. Vestager will visit chips research center Imec, while Dombrovskis will participate in the Trade and Labour Dialogue and a workshop on Data Access. Tech and trade lobby groups and other organizations have a gathering on Thursday from 5:15-6:30 p.m. CET.

Friday: The plenary event will take place on Friday.

What’s the location? All eyes are on Leuven’s Faculty Club, a university-affiliated event venue at the beguinage of the city, where most meetings are expected to be held.

A leaders’ dinner is also planned at the Michelin-starred Arenberg restaurant just outside town, a stone’s throw away from Imec’s headquarters, we hear.

INSIDER TIP: “If you were a top EU or U.S. leader with 10 minutes to spare in Leuven, what would you do?” we asked the city’s mayor Mohamed Ridouani. His tip: visit the university library designed by American architect Whitney Warren who also designed New York’s Grand Central Station. When you’re done with that, step outside and have a pintje in local café Commerce just opposite the library. We’ll endorse that.

US (FINALLY) TAKES ON DATA BROKERS

THE US GOVERNMENT TOOK ITS BIGGEST STEPS to restrict data brokersin the span of a single month — though compared with Europe’s privacy regulations, that isn’t saying much.

On February 28, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that restricts data brokers from selling Americans’ sensitive information to foreign adversaries — countries like China, Russia and North Korea. (More on that below.) Just three weeks later, on March 20, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill seeking the same restrictions, though both are slightly different in their definitions.

While Congress has investigated and questioned data brokers for more than a decade, the legislation passed in March is the most significant action it’s ever taken against the industry. It passed overwhelmingly, with 414 votes in support of the bill and no votes against it.

The bill heads to the Senate next, where it does not have a companion bill but has important support from Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.).

“We’re encouraged by today’s strong vote, which should help build momentum to get this important bipartisan legislation, as well as more comprehensive privacy legislation, signed into law this Congress,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and ranking member Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) said in a joint statement.

While it’s arguably the strongest action that the U.S. government has ever taken on data brokers, it leaves a lot to be desired, privacy experts argue. For starters, the bill does nothing to limit data brokers selling Americans’ sensitive information domestically, or even selling to a country that could later give that data to a foreign adversary.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a privacy hawk in Congress, argued that the bill should expand its scope beyond foreign adversaries, recommending that the restrictions instead be based on risk.

“Otherwise, all we are doing is giving a boost to shady data brokers in Cyprus and Dubai, who will buy and resell Americans’ personal data to our adversaries,” he said in a statement to POLITICO.

Privacy advocates in the U.S. are clamoring for restrictions on the data brokers themselves, not just who the companies can sell to. Unlike the EU, Americans have no federal data privacy regulations limiting data brokers. It means that Americans do not have the right to request data brokers delete their information, or opt out of their information being sold.

“We should not leave any decision over our personal, sensitive data to data brokers who have shown such blatant disregard in how they handle it,” Representative Lori Trahan (D-Massachusetts), said in a statement.

**When people come out in numbers, democracy works better – organize a watch party with your fellow European citizens so you can watch the Maastricht Debate in person - register here!**

BY THE NUMBERS

UPENDING THE DATA TRANSFER ORTHODOXY

AMERICA’S DATA FLOWS ZEITENWENDE: President Biden’s executive order on data brokers also ripped up decades of Western orthodoxy on data transfers. Washington has been the West’s loudest cheerleader for the borderless data flows, often clashing with Brussels over the latters’ privacy-driven restrictions on exporting people’s personal information (Schrems I and II, anyone?). The presidential order, which introduces limits to the “large-scale transfer of Americans’ personal data to countries of concern” — albeit in the name of national security — changes that.

I say potato, you say potato: Peter Swire, whom regular readers will know as one of the architects of a new data pact between the EU and the U.S., said the significance of the shift depended on which angle you look at it from. “For the national security community, this executive order is one more modest step in the same direction they’ve already been walking. But for the privacy community, it’s an unprecedented change of rules governing data flows,” he said. “It’s an important, but limited shift.”

Pulling rank: The question now is whether the U.S. will pressure military allies to follow suit on implementing restrictions on data flows to adversaries. Britain, for one, is already feeling the squeeze, according to a person briefed on discussions, while another confirmed that Washington had conversations with allies in its Five Eyes Anglosphere security alliance, as well as Japan and Germany, about its data plans. They were granted anonymity to speak about sensitive discussions.

WONK OF THE WEEK

WE’RE STAYING IN WASHINGTON, where President Biden last Thursday announced that he planned to nominate Michael Sulmeyer to be assistant secretary of defense, with a focus on cyber policy. The position — requiring Senate approval — is a new one, our colleague Maggie Miller reports, and was created as part of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act.

Sulmeyer now serves as the secretary of the Army’s principal cyber adviser. He had previously worked with U.S. Cyber Command and the White House National Security Council.

In an academic setting, Sulmeyer was director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs’ Cybersecurity Project. He’d also taught law at the University of Texas and been a senior fellow in security and emerging tech at Georgetown University.

THEY SAID WHAT, NOW?

“I’m trying hard not to be constructive and charming,” Google’s Oliver Bethell quipped during a Digital Markets Act compliance workshop after a tech executive in the room accused the search giant of “charmingly” presenting new designs that “blatantly” break the rules. Bethell also got a round of applause from lobbyists for accidentally calling Google’s public report on its compliance plan a “non-compliance” report. “It’s been a long day!” he said. During such workshops, the European Commission hears Big Tech companies defend their DMA compliance plans — while industry lobbyists poke holes in them.

WHAT WE’RE READING

— Pardon the plug, but POLITICO’s transatlantic team of tech reporters had a definitive look at the political fight around artificial intelligence raging around the world, mostly in the shadows. How to control the world’s most dangerous technology? Find that big read here.

— The EU’s Official Journal has published cases brought against the European Commission by Meta and TikTok, respectively, in early February over the Digital Services Act’s supervisory fees.

— It’s already been a brutal year for the news industry, and AI could still make it worse. For the Brookings Institution, Courtney C. Radsch looks at what burgeoning tech means for the media.

— Digital rights NGO Access Now looks at how internet shutdowns are exacerbating the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Sudan.

— There’s an ongoing insatiable thirst for data when it comes to policymaking — but it comes at a cost, writes C. Thi Nguyen for Issues in Science and Technology.

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