European attitudes toward digital privacy and technology regulation are dismissed in the US as technophobia. But there are distinct, historically grounded reasons why Europe has moved further and faster to regulate Big Tech: There’s the memory of the surveillance states run by the Nazis and the Stassi, the absence of a European version of Silicon Valley (with all of the Valley’s financial clout in domestic politics), and a fundamentally different idea about what personal data is and what can legitimately be done with it. Any serious analysis of transatlantic technology policy means taking these issues into account—especially as the US begins to confront its own looming day of reckoning with the power of the platform.