"European Commission accused of ‘massive rollback’ of digital protections", 19 November 2025

...The European Commission has been accused of “a massive rollback” of the EU’s digital rules after announcing proposals to delay central parts of the Artificial Intelligence Act and water down its landmark data protection regulation.

If agreed, the changes would make it easier for tech firms to use personal data to train AI models without asking for consent, and try to end “cookie banner fatigue” by reducing the number times internet users have to give their permission to being tracked on the internet.

The plans were part of the commission’s “digital omnibus”, which tries to streamline tech rules including GDPR, the AI Act, the ePrivacy directive and the Data Act...

European Digital Rights (EDRi), a pan-European network of NGOs, described the plans as “a major rollback of EU digital protections” that risked dismantling “the very foundations of human rights and tech policy in the EU”....

European business groups welcomed the proposals but said they did not go far enough. A representative from the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, said: “Efforts to simplify digital and tech rules cannot stop here.” The CCIA urged “a more ambitious, all-encompassing review of the EU’s entire digital rulebook”....

The commission’s vice-president in charge of tech policy, Henna Virkkunen, pushed back against suggestions that Brussels was responding to US pressure. “We want to support our start ups, our SMEs to scale up their businesses to innovate in the EU,” she said. “We are not so much here looking at big industries or the very big tech companies … They have also the resources to comply with different rules.”...