On a breezy but still warm day recently, around 200 international guests gathered inside of Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, an imposing, neo-renaissance museum building. The agenda was no less grand than the surroundings: to defend Europe’s citizens from hostile forces outside its borders while turning the region into a global leader for setting standards in tech regulation. 

Organized by Austria’s Erste Foundation, which encourages citizens to become active members of society, the conference — “How the EU can take the lead in governing technology globally” — addressed the growing need for the regulation of large technology companies, such as Facebook or Google. 

“Trust is lost. Stakes are very high. We need to pull this all into public accountability,” said the keynote speaker, Marietje Schaake, former member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands. Schaake was speaking to the media at the sidelines of the conference. 

Silicon Valley’s giants stand accused of a plethora of far-reaching systemic flaws ranging from discriminatory race and gender practices in algorithmic decision making to enabling the use of micro-targeting to spread political propaganda. In the EU, the big tech platforms have come under increasing scrutiny with the bloc’s ground-breaking data protection regulation (GDPR) coming into effect last year.