- Europe already has a proven industrial model in Airbus; it does not need to imitate Silicon Valley’s hyperscaler empire-building.
- Deregulation may enrich telecom incumbents while weakening Europe’s sovereignty and public-interest protections.
- Looser EU rules could eventually allow a U.S. hyperscaler to buy a major 5G incumbent, with Nokia the most likely candidate. That would be bad.
In late April 2026, a coalition of major European telecom and technology firms — including Ericsson, Nokia and Vodafone — issued a coordinated call for sweeping deregulation across the European Union. In a high-profile campaign amplified through Politico Europe and industry summits, the companies argued that Europe’s current competition rules, fragmented markets, and regulatory structures are “choking” innovation and preventing the continent from competing with the United States and China.
Börje Ekholm, the CEO of Swedish telecom giant Ericsson, who resides in the U.S., warned that Europe risks becoming a “museum” with “no industry left.”
My goodness - that sounds serious, doesn't it?
Lucky for Europe, Ekholm and his colleagues are proposing a simple solution: loosen antitrust rules, encourage market consolidation, unlock private capital and create larger European “champions” capable of operating at hyperscale. The argument is emotionally powerful because it appeals to Europe’s growing fear of technological decline — most dramatically represented by Germany’s catastrophic industrial implosion. But it also conceals a dangerous assumption: that big is better, or that what is good for large corporations is automatically good for Europe itself.
It is not. This is “stinking thinking,” as both the Happy Mondays and Albert Ellis would say.
What is really being proposed here is not merely telecom reform. It is the gradual transformation of Europe’s communications sector into a hyperscaler-style industry: larger, more consolidated, less regulated, more tightly integrated with AI and cloud infrastructure and ultimately more compatible with the interests of U.S. technology platforms.
The danger is that Europe, in attempting to defend itself against American and Chinese technological dominance, may do the opposite, opening the door to the increased domination of European markets by U.S. hyperscalers. That would be bad for Europe, its sovereignty and ultimately its population.
Scale, profit and the hollowing out of telecom ethics
These firms are not advocating deregulation because they are noble guardians of Europe’s strategic autonomy. They are doing it for the money, because deregulation expands strategic optionality for themselves and their shareholders while increasing profitability and market power. It enables the consolidation of markets, the reduction of competition, the reshaping of ownership structures, higher margins, lower competitive pressure and ultimately a repositioning within the emerging global AI-cloud-network stack dominated by hyperscalers.
This is the real story unfolding beneath the rhetoric about “competitiveness,” and it reflects the systematic hollowing out of the technology industry’s ethical core in the U.S. over the past half-century — a putrefaction that now risks spreading into Europe.
As technology has grown ever more powerful and lucrative, the rewards have not simply changed the priorities of the biggest tech players, they have corrupted them, replacing responsibility with a mindless, amoral pursuit of scale and profit.
In the last quarter of the 20th century, telecom had a clear understanding of its role — not merely to make money, but to provide a vital public function: connecting people around the world to advance knowledge, understanding and collaboration (cue sound of heavenly chorus of angels).
This ethos was inherited from the era of state-run PTTs (Post, Telegraph and Telephone administrations), where public service — not profit - was the priority. That sense of duty extended to telecom vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent, Siemens and Nortel. They were not saints — but they were engineers first, profiteers second.
But by the 1990s, the ethical centre had begun to shift. A new class of vendors — Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard — reoriented the industry toward enterprise markets and a more explicitly commercial logic: packets for profit, you might say.
In the 2010s, U.S. hyperscalers accelerated that shift. Globally scaled, software-defined platforms delivered unprecedented growth — and a far more ruthless operating model: scale at any cost, dominate markets and defer the consequences.
With each successive layer of the industry, profits have risen while ethical and moral constraints have progressively weakened, bringing the technology sector to a troubling inflection point — one in which some of the world’s most valuable companies derive growth from increasingly coercive applications of their technology.
It is a stark indictment that the most immediate and transformative impacts of these advances are being realized not in agriculture, medicine or energy, but in military weaponry, surveillance systems and algorithmic control.
What is different today is not simply the speed of innovation, but the near-total collapse of responsibility among many who drive it.
Is this really what Europe wants for its future? Because that is effectively what these companies are arguing for.
The real endgame: Becoming hyperscalers or selling to them
The goal is not merely to create “larger European telecom companies.” The goal is to become hyperscalers themselves — or, failing that, to cash out by becoming strategically valuable components inside hyperscaler ecosystems dominated by companies like Amazon Web Services, Google and Nvidia.
Telecom infrastructure is no longer a standalone industry. 5G, edge computing, AI inference, cloud services, networking and the grid are converging into a single integrated technology stack. Whoever controls that stack controls enormous economic, social and political power.
Spin-offs, joint ventures, partial asset sales and strategic carve-outs are becoming increasingly likely.
Under its new leadership, Nokia has already begun simplifying itself in ways that make this future easier to execute. It has sold its fixed wireless access division and is evaluating selling its private 5G business.
Ironically, Ericsson may be less likely to become an acquisition target precisely because it remains relatively focused and intact. Nokia, by contrast, is increasingly modular — and therefore increasingly “buyable.”
If Europe were to move toward full deregulation of merger and competition rules, a far more consequential outcome becomes possible: the acquisition of one of these 5G vendors by a hyperscaler.
Under current frameworks overseen by the European Commission, such a deal would be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, due to competition and national security concerns. But that is precisely why these companies are demanding deregulation. Remove enough safeguards, and the previously impossible becomes merely controversial.
For a hyperscaler, the logic would be obvious. Acquiring a company like Nokia would provide direct control over 5G infrastructure, completing vertical integration across cloud, AI, and connectivity.
This is the stuff of global domination, like getting all six Infinity Stones in the Marvel Universe.
For Europe, the consequences would be profound—and potentially catastrophic. It would mean losing control over half of its 5G vendor base, effectively ceding a critical layer of digital infrastructure to a non-European entity. Strategic autonomy would be weakened, not strengthened.
The Americanization of Europe’s telecom elite
Leadership signals should be read in this context. Ericsson’s CEO, Börje Ekholm, has publicly endorsed relocating Ericsson from Sweden to the U.S. — the cultural equivalent of moving the Nobel Peace Prize from Oslo to Mar-a-Lago. And he has increasingly aligned himself with the U.S. financial and technology ecosystem.
His appearance at NASDAQ recently, ringing the bell, was not merely symbolic. Nor was the controversy surrounding Ericsson’s contribution toward Donald Trump’s inauguration — a move that appeared to contradict the spirit, if not necessarily the letter, of Ericsson’s own ethics policy and generated significant internal backlash among employees.
The public record does not indicate whether Mr. Ekholm has now taken to wearing a Jeff Bezos-style Stetson. We simply do not know. But based on recent behavior, it would no longer feel entirely out of character.
These are not irrelevant anecdotes. They are tells. They point toward a worldview in which the U.S. system — larger capital markets, looser attitudes toward consolidation, and closer ties between hyperscalers and infrastructure — is seen as the preferred model.
This is especially dangerous because U.S. hyperscalers, with a combined market capitalization of over $15 trillion, already possess extraordinary power. They dominate cloud computing, increasingly dominate AI infrastructure and aggressively shape digital ecosystems around themselves. They routinely minimize tax exposure through international structures, centralize control over personal data, extract enormous economic rents from markets without corresponding local accountability, and increasingly sell consumer and AI technologies into military and surveillance systems operated by governments with deeply questionable human-rights records.
At this point, Big Tech’s ethical standing is slightly lower than that of Big Oil and Big Pharma: enormously profitable sectors whose extraordinary power has repeatedly collided with public trust, democratic accountability and social well-being.
That is why the political dimension of this debate matters.
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, (loud booing from the crowd), has increasingly aligned the Commission with transatlantic industrial priorities at the very moment U.S. hyperscalers are intensifying pressure on Europe’s regulatory framework. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has cultivated exceptionally close relationships with major U.S. technology leaders and hyperscalers.
At the same time, reports have emerged suggesting that sections of Big Tech are actively courting European far-right parties in an effort to weaken EU competition and digital regulation. US tech giants are allying with European far-right to strip back EU rules.
These developments are signs pointing in the same direction: toward a future in which Europe dismantles its own regulatory barriers in pursuit of “competitiveness,” only to accelerate the concentration of power into even fewer global technology platforms.
Europe’s false choice
The announcement this week by Ericsson, Nokia, Vodafone and others suggests that there is a simple answer to Europe’s problems. Unfortunately, there is not. Every possible path forward — industrial policy, deregulation, consolidation, strategic investment — comes with risks that may prove just as damaging as Europe’s current stagnation, if not worse.
The danger is not that Europe will fail to act. The danger is that it will act on the false belief that scale alone is the answer, driven not by the best interests of Europe but by a desire to share in the extraordinary concentration of wealth that is now hollowing out sections of the American middle and working classes.
Europe’s telecom leaders argue that only scale can save the continent from irrelevance. But if the price of that scale is dismantling the very regulatory barriers that prevent hyperscaler domination, Europe may discover too late that it has not created continental champions at all.
It has merely prepared its infrastructure layer for acquisition and exploitation.
A proven alternative: The Airbus model
There is an alternative to what is being proposed here, and it is not theoretical. It is one of the most successful examples of state-supported industrial development in modern history: Airbus.
Rather than mimicking the hyperscaler philosophy of “all for one and none for all,” Europe could repeat the approach that transformed Airbus from an improbable multinational project into a global industrial powerhouse capable of competing directly with Boeing.
That success did not emerge from deregulation, laissez-faire ideology or hyperscaler-style market Darwinism. It was the product of a coordinated, long-term industrial strategy backed by European governments working together over decades. European states collectively supported Airbus through enormous subsidies, procurement support, financing structures and industrial coordination estimated to total hundreds of billions of dollars over time.
In other words, the Airbus model represents almost the exact opposite philosophy to the one now being proposed by Ericsson, Nokia and others.
Not hyperscaler-style free-market extraction.
Not deregulation.
Not “let the biggest players consolidate and hope for the best.”
But government-directed industrial policy combined with patient financial backing, strategic coordination and explicit public-interest goals.
For almost half a century, the U.S. virulently opposed this approach — not only domestically, but internationally through proxies such as the World Bank. Developing countries were repeatedly pressured to dismantle state-led economic programs, privatize industries and subordinate industrial policy to free-market orthodoxy as a condition of receiving financial support.
And yet even the World Bank has increasingly acknowledged in recent years that this approach often failed, and that government participation is frequently an essential component of successful industrialization and long-term economic development.
Europe already possesses a successful model of strategic industrial coordination. It does not need to import a hyperscaler ideology from Silicon Valley in which infrastructure, data, communications and eventually governance itself become concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of transnational corporations.
It needs to relearn its own history.
Because the people currently urging Europe to deregulate itself into hyperscaler-compatible markets are not neutral philosophers of economic progress. They are executives whose incentives are tied to scale, valuation, consolidation and ultimately their own balance sheets — including, increasingly, offshore ones.
One U.S. expert points out that America’s recent actions make the likelihood of cooperation with it and its largest companies less likely around the world.
“As America proclaims 'America First,' the rest of the world responds: 'If that’s your strategy, we say America alone,” said New Street Research's Blair Levin, chief architect of the 2010 National Broadband Plan, in a recent interview with FNTV. “Traditional allies are rethinking their relationships. America no longer has the same trusted voice it once did," he noted.
That’s bad news for America, bad news for hyperscalers and it makes European telecom companies pell-mell rush towards hyperscalerism even more ill-advised.
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Stephen M. Saunders MBE is a communications analyst and USPTO-registered inventor examining how digital infrastructure — 5G, cloud, and AI — is reshaping industry, power and society, as well as underpinning the emerging, ubiquitous global digital economy. As anchor of FNTV and a longtime industry insider, he focuses less on growth narratives and more on execution, risk and how hyperscale technology is distorting markets, governance and society at scale.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not necessarily represent the opinions of Fierce Network.