EU will
not rip up tech rules for trade deal with Trump, senior official says
Bloc is
‘very committed’ to laws on big tech and is not targeting US companies, says
European Commission’s Henna Virkkunen
Jennifer
Rankin in Brussels
Fri 11 Apr
2025 05.00 BST
The EU will
not rip up its tech rules in an attempt to reach a trade deal with Donald
Trump, the bloc’s most senior official on digital policy has said.
Henna
Virkkunen, the European Commission vice-president responsible for tech
sovereignty, indicated the EU was not going to compromise on its digital
rulebook to reach an agreement on trade with the US – a key demand of Trump
administration officials.
“We are very
committed to our rules when it comes to the digital world,” Virkkunen said in
an interview with European newspapers, including the Guardian. “We want to make
sure that our digital environment in the European Union … that it is fair and
it’s safe and it’s also democratic.”
She gently
pushed back at suggestions that EU digital regulations could be considered
trade barriers, saying the same rules applied to all companies, whether
European, American or Chinese. “We are not specially targeting certain
companies, but we have this risk-based approach in all our rules.”
In recent
days, Trump’s senior trade adviser, Peter Navarro, has claimed the EU was using
“lawfare” against the US’s largest tech firms, in an FT article featuring a
litany of complaints against supposed “non-tariff weapons”. The Meta chief
executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has accused the EU of “institutionalising
censorship”, while Trump has attacked European decisions to impose fines and
pursue anti-trust investigations into the likes of Apple and Facebook.
Referring to
the EU’s digital rules, Virkkunen said US tech firms often had greater
obligations, because they were among the biggest companies on the market: “When
you are a bigger player, then there are more obligations, because you are
posing a bigger risk.”
She was
speaking the morning after Trump announced a whiplash-inducing 90-day pause on
many tariffs, but before the commission announced a matching freeze in its
retaliation. The EU still faces 10% tariffs, as well as 25% duties on cars and
metals entering the US.
Welcoming
the US decision on “reciprocal” tariffs, she said: “We want to have a good
trade agreement with the USA and we don’t want to have a trade war.”
While the
commission has said that all retaliatory options remain on the table if trade
talks fail, Virkkunen declined to “speculate” about possible EU actions against
US tech companies. France has led calls to consider measures against US tech
firms in response to tariffs on European goods. Virkkunen said “different
options” for retaliation had been prepared in consultation with member states.
Virkkunen, a
former Finnish government minister and MEP, took up her post at the commission
last December, having been given a sprawling brief covering “tech sovereignty”
as well as overseeing security and border control policies, and protecting
European democracy from disinformation.
One of the
most highly charged issues on her plate is overseeing investigations into big
tech firms under the EU’s new digital rules. The commission is investigating
firms including Alphabet, Apple and Meta under the Digital Markets Act, which
is intended to ensure big tech does not crowd out smaller rivals in the
marketplace. Separately, via the Digital Services Act, which is designed to
counter online harms, it is running investigations into firms including X and
Meta.
Risking a
further falling-out with the US, in March the commission pushed ahead with
enforcement action against Apple and Alphabet, the owner of Google, accusing
them of breaking the DMA with anti-competitive behaviour.
Asked about
reports that the commission could fine X more than $1bn (£770m), she said: “Our
goal in these investigations and proceedings is not to impose big fines. Our
goal is to make sure that all the companies are complying with our rules.”
Virkkunen, a
member of the transnational European People’s party, stressed her wish to
ensure Europe’s digital rules were not too cumbersome for small businesses,
amid rising concern about Europe’s anaemic economic growth in comparison with
the US and China, which are also far more advanced in artificial intelligence
technologies. “We are lagging very much behind because 80% of our technology is
coming outside of the European Union, so there’s a lot of work ahead of us,”
she said.
This week,
she outlined a strategy to create up to five AI gigafactories, sites equipped
with vast supercomputers to test and develop AI models in the EU. But her
openness to consider revising the EU’s landmark AI legislation has also rung
alarm bells among consumer groups. She said: “We want to implement the AI Act
in a very innovation-friendly manner, and we really want to support our SMEs
and our AI developers to comply with the rules.”
The EU’s AI
Act has sparked deep concerns from writers, musicians and other creatives, who
say they have no protection for their copyright from big tech’s generative AI
systems, which draw on droves of books, newspapers, songs and images to feed
their databases. In a tacit acknowledgment that there could be a gap, Virkkunen
said: “It looks that now further steps have to be taken here.”
She added:
“I think it’s important that we find a good solution … [to] support our
copyright holders and all the right-holders and the creative industry to give
their content for AI training and for AI purposes. At the same time, they also
have to get fair compensation for that. But I see that it’s also problematic if
European content is not used for training AI.”
The
commission, she said, was examining “how we could support different licensing
models … to make sure that we have good balance here”.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário