▪ The EU claims it wants to work with like-minded allies like the United States on tech standards, yet it is enacting rules to exclude U.S. experts from its standards-setting processes. This undermines a key goal of the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council.

▪ Technical experts from U.S. and other foreign firms have long helped European policymakers craft standards to address policy concerns—and these firms often adopt EU standards. Excluding them thus jeopardizes Europe’s global influence.

▪ No country has expertise in every technology, so including experts from all firms leads to better results, as evidenced in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s open, global efforts to select the best post-quantum encryption standards.

▪ The European Commission justifies its new restrictions as necessary to defend European “values” and “interests,” even though one of Europe’s own standards organizations has stated the Commission’s fears of U.S. firms are unfounded and purely hypothetical.

▪ The Commission goes as far as putting U.S. firms in the same category as Chinese firms, which suggests the “values” and “interests” it is protecting are mercantilist, not the more virtuous shared EU-U.S. values of free and open trade and democracy.

▪ Technology standards thus serve as a new protectionist tool in Europe’s quest for cybersovereignty—a way to deliberately exclude foreign firms and products in favor of local ones.