BRUSSELS — The EU’s tech fines are a “tariff” on U.S. companies and the bloc is going in the “wrong direction” with its tech regulation, Meta’s top lobbyist Joel Kaplan said Tuesday.
Kaplan slammed the EU’s recent practice of imposing hefty fines on companies like Meta during a live-streamed interview at a Meta event in Brussels. He warned the bloc will miss out on the current artificial intelligence wave if it presses ahead with its tech rules.
“We do consider them to be a tax or a tariff on U.S. companies,” Kaplan said when asked whether he agreed with other similar recent assessments of the EU’s tech fines.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said in early January that the way the EU’s tech rules are being applied is “almost like a tariff.” U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month that the EU’s fines for privacy, antitrust and tax issues are “a form of taxation.”
Kaplan singled out a €797 million fine that the EU slapped on Meta in November due to the dominance of Facebook Marketplace, saying the online listing “wasn’t harming consumers or competitors.”
“European regulators have sort of measured success based on the number and size of fines that they’ve been able to assess against U.S. tech companies,” he said.
He argued this approach will not help Europe become more competitive.
Kaplan noted that “a lot of” policymakers and business leaders are pressing the EU to focus on becoming more competitive, but argued that Brussels is instead “doubl[ing] down” on regulation.
He criticized the EU’s effort to develop a voluntary set of rules for general-purpose AI models, such as OpenAI’s GPT or Meta’s Llama. He indicated that Meta would not sign it as is.
The set of rules, Kaplan maintained, goes “beyond the requirements of the law” (the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act) and establishes “unworkable and technically unfeasible requirements.”
Work on the rules is expected to wrap up in April; success hinges on whether companies like Meta sign up for them.
Kaplan also touched on Meta’s content moderation overhaul, in which it ended its fact-checking program in the U.S. Fact-checking will be replaced by a user-driven system of community notes, which X already uses.
He said the program will launch “elsewhere” in 2026 and that he expects to be able to roll out the content moderation changes in the EU as well.
He emphasized, though, that the company would work with European regulators whenever it decides to bring those changes to the EU.
The post Meta chief lobbyist slams EU tech laws and fines appeared first on Politico.
