BRUSSELS — European Union lawmakers are pushing enforcers to resist any pressure from the United States over laws that curb Big Tech.
Influential members of the European Parliament are worried that the European Commission may back off from tough enforcement of rules that regulate social media, digital competition and artificial intelligence for fear of retaliation from U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg recently urged the Trump administration to defend U.S. tech giants against EU fines and regulation. X’s Elon Musk has become a close Trump ally and Apple’s Tim Cook has also complained to Trump about the EU.
The Commission should “stand strong against this pressure from parts of Big Tech,” said Christel Schaldemose, a Danish member of the Parliament who helped usher in the Digital Services Act rules now being used to probe X and Meta.
“If anyone wants to do business in [the] EU, they have to comply with the rules,” she said. “No one forces Zuckerberg to offer Meta services in [the] EU. If he does not like to pay fines, he could start making sure Meta complies.”
The Parliament’s plenary session will grill the Commission on Tuesday morning on tech companies’ compliance with the DSA. Lawmakers are also set to bring up Musk’s support for Trump and Meta’s decision to end a fact-checking program that had sought to stem misleading information online.
Musk’s recent endorsement of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland and other attacks on European governments on X have drawn even more DSA scrutiny. The Commission deepened a probe into X on Friday, seeking more information about how X accounts go viral and what tweaks it has made to how it serves content.
Thirty-eight lawmakers last week pressed the Commission to investigate Musk’s “interference” in the German election campaign as the owner of a social network that promotes “his personal opinions at the cost of artificial visibility of his posts and misleading content, they said in a letter to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, tech chief Henna Virkkunen and Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath.
They also asked where the Commission was in investigating X’s compliance with the DSA.
Top liberal parliamentarian Valérie Hayer separately accused the Commission of a “deafening silence” on Musk’s meddling in European politics when she spoke to reporters last Tuesday.
The Tuesday plenary debate gives the Commission the chance to respond and lay out its vision.
Andreas Schwab, a German center-right lawmaker who led the work on the Digital Markets Act competition rules to try and open up tech services, also told POLITICO last week that he’d tell officials directly that “a fast and ambitious implementation” was needed “whatever the current geopolitical context.”
The EU is still rolling out part of its ambitious tech rulebook, including the world’s first-ever binding artificial intelligence law, which imposes various rules on U.S.-based AI companies, such as OpenAI.
Italian Social Democrat Brando Benifei, the Parliament’s lead on the AI Act, told POLITICO that lawmakers will also question Virkkunen on Tuesday on how AI rules may be affected by DSA enforcement.
“We will pressure her on the willingness to fully implement the AI Act, also in its interaction with existing other legislation,” he said.
Francesca Micheletti contributed reporting.