Closer Than They Look

EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen on Wednesday played down the regulatory gulf between Brussels and Washington, arguing that US courts end up policing the same companies for the same behavior that European law targets in advance. "The differences are not so big when we look at it in practice," the European Commission's executive vice-president for tech sovereignty told AFP on the sidelines of a G20 meeting of technology ministers in North Carolina.

"In Europe, we have regulation in advance, and in the USA they are often coming with the court cases," she said. "The same companies, the same practices, are under investigation and under discussion." Her remarks came after two days of sessions in which the ministers were addressed by industry figures including Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, who used the platform to repeat the familiar charge that Europe over-regulates technology.

80 percent want careful AI regulation

Virkkunen said she did not accept the premise that innovation and regulation are opposites. She pointed to a recent Eurobarometer survey in which 80 percent of European respondents said careful regulation of AI was important for safety reasons. She noted that the absence of national tech laws in the United States has not left the industry free of government rules there, with hundreds of state-level AI rules.

"That is the situation we wanted to avoid with our AI Act, that we have one rule for the whole market," she said. The convergence could be seen most clearly in attitudes toward protecting minors on social media, where Meta reached a landmark settlement with nearly every US state, promising curfews and time limits for teens on Instagram and Facebook.