As EU seeks accountability, Mark Zuckerberg urges softer regulation
20 May, 2020
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Monday urged europe to take the lead in setting global standards for tech regulation or risk seeing countries follow China as a model.
“I think at this time a lot of other countries are looking at China... and saying: ‘Hey, that model looks like maybe it might work. Maybe it gives our government more control?’,” Zuckerberg said, throughout a video debate with EU commissioner Thierry Breton.
Beneath the Beijing model, “You don’t need to respect human rights quite as much in the way the society gets run,” he added.
“I just think that that’s really dangerous and I worry about this sort of model spreading to other countries,” Zuckerberg said in the talk, organised by the Centre on Regulation in Europe
“I think that the best antidote compared to that is having a clear regulatory framework that comes out of Western democratic countries, and that can become a standard all over the world,” he argued.
“When Europe sets policies, they often times become the standards all over the world,” he said, citing the EU’s GDPR data protection legislation, which has been widely replicated.
Breton, among the EU’s top officials on tech policy, said that Facebook and other big tech companies must also surpass certain values.
If you wish to have the right regulation “you have to have a clear group of values and in Europe we've these values,” he said, hinting Facebook sometimes fell short, especially on controlling against the law content or paying fair taxes.
“At the end of your day, if we cannot find a way, we will regulate, of course,” he warned
Lobbying drive
“It is extremely important that while you are CEO, at the end of your day, you are the only one to be responsible,” Breton said.
“The mission of a CEO is to listen to everyone and to take your choice. By the end of the day, it'll be Mark who'll be responsible, nobody else.”
The debate came as Facebook embarks on a European lobbying campaign.
The European Commission is ramping up towards a Digital Service Act, a significant piece of EU lawmaking designed to curb the powers of US big tech.
The law would include all areas of the digital world, including cracking down on hate speech, protecting user data and avoiding big companies from abusing their dominant market positions.
Silicon Valley organizations are preparing a furious lobbying counterattack to limit its reach.
Left unchecked, regulations could force Facebook, Google, Amazon or Apple to split their businesses, and perhaps provide rivals access to their data and act more as public utilities rather than profit-seeking innovators.
Regulations would also make the giants liable for unlawful content-such as hate speech or pirated music - reversing a laissez faire policy they state fuelled the internet revolution.
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