Over the past few days, and honestly weeks, I’ve been saving articles like crazy. And it’s only January 27. We’re 26 days into 2026 and it already feels like a full year happened.
A lot of it has nothing to do with apps, at least not directly. Trump and Greenland put Europe on edge again, and it even became a topic in Davos.[1] At the same time, Europe opened an investigation into Grok on X because of how easily it can generate sexual deepfakes and non-consensual nude images.[2] TikTok “solved” its US problem by creating a new US entity, but the whole thing shows how fragile these platforms are once politics turns.[3]
And then we get to the part that hits daily life for a lot of people: WhatsApp.
The European Commission has now officially designated WhatsApp as a Very Large Online Platform under the Digital Services Act, because Channels crossed the threshold in the EU.[4]
All these stories feel connected. The red wire for me is dependency. Europe is finally asking harder questions about what happens when the digital infrastructure we rely on is owned somewhere else, governed somewhere else, and can change overnight because of decisions we don’t control.
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