In a misguided move, the EU is attempting to regulate American tech companies, meddling in Americans’ speech and innovation. The EU’s extensive laws, covering content moderation, antitrust, and AI, disproportionately affect U.S. firms. The EU’s view of regulations as “aspirational” adds uncertainty, allowing selective enforcement. This overreach spans from social media to children’s toys, leaving Americans rightly concerned about their freedom of expression and innovation.
via Daily Caller:
“The European Union’s (EU) regulatory agenda will largely hit U.S. technology companies and will impact Americans’ speech and lifestyle by stifling innovation, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The EU laws consist of content moderation regulation, antitrust enforcement and artificial intelligence (AI) model rules, all carrying massive financial penalties for violation. The laws apply to platforms that have large user bases in the EU, which are mainly American companies, with the EU recently launching a formal investigation into billionaire Elon Musk’s X and bipartisan lawmakers pushing President Joe Biden to ensure the regulation does not harm U.S. firms unfairly, according to Reuters.
“The EU views industry regulations as aspirational, which means there’s an element of selective enforcement and only require industry to put good-faith efforts when complying,” Joel Thayer, president of the Digital Progress Institute, told the DCNF. “It’s why they are far more strident. … Therein lies the problem, the EU can turn the dial up or down on how fervently they will regulate. Given how broad all of these laws are—particularly the AI Act, this means that every company that either creates software, distributes software, or has it in their devices are implicated. The EU’s laws now encompass everything from social media to children’s toys.”
The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) went into effect in August, and it punishes “very large online platforms” for hosting content like “illegal hate speech” and “disinformation” with fines of up to 6% of their annual global revenue.”