EGN NEWS DESK
Virkkunen on Tuesday took a quintessential Brussels method to the difficulty, sticking to her script and spelling out the identical, legalistic reply all night: Any firm working in Europe should abide by its guidelines. She mentioned she needed to hurry up the investigations beneath the DSA, however the work wanted to be “evidence-based.”
She stopped in need of any touch upon how Musk has didn’t cease misinformation and dangerous content material from spreading on X — an enormous distinction with incumbent EU Commission Vice President Věra Jourová, who referred to as Musk a “promoter of evil” solely a month in the past and advised POLITICO he “shouldn’t be capable of acknowledge good and evil.”
Dodging the Musk questions, Virkkunen additionally underscored a conundrum she’ll face within the coming years. One half of her mandate is to make sure European safety, for which EU international locations are closely reliant on the U.S. The different half is to spice up European “tech sovereignty,” which frequently means going face to face with American tech giants dominating social media, cloud, AI and different key applied sciences — and risking rubbing the U.S. the fallacious approach.
A second of reality will likely be when EU companies wrap up their probe into Musk’s X and its content material moderation insurance policies.
X was charged by the EU in July for breaching these guidelines over verified customers, promoting transparency and giving researchers entry to knowledge. The Commission is at the moment making ready a wonderful that might go as much as 6 p.c of X’s annual world income — and even larger, because the Commission is contemplating calculating the penalty from earnings derived from Musk’s different firms, together with SpaceX and Neuralink.
2. The nice tech hole is obvious
Virkkunen had no downside pointing to Europe’s many shortcomings in 5G and fiber rollout, synthetic intelligence, microchips, cloud capabilities and digital expertise, warning repeatedly that the bloc was “lagging behind” and confronted a “widening” hole.
