Thierry Breton, the European commissioner who fought to bring the Digital Services Act (DSA) together, has just been designated “persona non grata” by the US — and it’s actually great news!

After 8 years working in communications and using Meta as a primary channel for most of the brands I’ve managed, I was utterly disgusted in early 2025 when they aligned with the Trump administration, like the rest of big tech. Then I learned about the 14 investigations launched by the EU into tech platforms in November 2025 under the DSA, and I got hopeful again.

The DSA imposes content moderation, requires major platforms to explain their moderation decisions, provides transparency for users, and ensures researchers can carry out essential work – such as understanding how much children are exposed to dangerous content. Thanks to that same law, X/Elon Musk were fined €120 million three weeks ago.

So banning the EU commissioner who led the project feels like a desperate clap-back – an admission that courageous regulators scare them, that there is a path to fight US tech overlords and their threats to democracy.

While escalations might increase for a while, it will hopefully lead to more discussions around digital sovereignty. Recent leaked documents showed how Meta made more money from advertising scam revenue than the entire US news industry’s ad revenue.

In China, they chose to keep scams because they represented 19% of their revenue – a sweet € 3 billion. While data in Mauritius is still missing, this threat may become harder to ignore given the digital literacy of our population. It would be genuinely exciting to see who will take the lead in forming a regional bloc to tackle the tech giants.