The News
The Trump administration has reportedly made clear that it wants Europe to drop content moderation requirements for US tech giants. Vice President JD Vance offered hints of the crusading approach at the February AI summit in Paris, where he denounced two European laws: the privacy-focused GDPR (“endless legal compliance costs”) and the Digital Services Act (“policing so-called misinformation”), and negotiators have followed up. The big US platforms are likely to win these fights, the German legislator and Big Tech critic Franziska Brantner told me. The companies “do not pretend any more that they want to comply,” and the Digital Services Act depends on their compliance, while her government has more urgent priorities, like auto exports.
The bigger question for Big Tech now may have to do with another piece of European regulation, the trust-busting Digital Markets Act. It remains unclear to Silicon Valley’s giants whether Trump wants to make the US a shining MAGA city on a Hill, crusading against speech regulation (good!) and against Big Tech (uh-oh) around the world — or whether the US government’s relationship with tech in Europe will be like its partnership with, say, the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. Mark Zuckerberg, who recently bought a place in DC, is hoping for the latter approach, The Wall Street Journal recently reported.
Speaking about the DMA on Thursday, European Commission Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera suggested the EU isn’t likely to back down. “What is very important for us is to ensure that there is an increasingly credible response to ensure thorough compliance with the regulation,” Ribera said.
Mathias Hammer contributed reporting.