Macron Says Brussels is ‘Afraid’ of Tackling US Big Tech
By PIETER HAECK AND OCÉANE HERRERO
An “American offensive” has cowed the European Commission and some EU capitals, French president complains.
French President Emmanuel Macron has said Brussels is too slow in its handling of probes into American Big Tech companies due to U.S. pressure over the EU’s digital laws.
“We have cases that have been before the Commission for two years. It’s much too slow,” Macron said Friday in reference to the EU’s content moderation rule book, the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The debate around the matter is “not gaining momentum,” Macron told a local town hall event in the Vosges region, and “many in the Commission and member states are afraid to pursue it because there’s an American offensive against the application of directives on digital services and markets.”
Macron promised to push for action at the EU level, adding: “We have a geopolitical battle to fight. This is not Russian interference, it is clearly American because these platforms do not want us to bother them.”
Macron’s remarks follow a week that saw renewed pressure from the U.S. over the EU’s two tech rulebooks, the DSA and the Digital Markets Act.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged EU ministers on Monday to “reconsider” the rulebooks in exchange for lower U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs, in line with the American playbook of treating the EU’s tech rules as a bargaining chip in a transatlantic trade war. The rules have been a target for the U.S. administration and tech executives ever since President Donald Trump returned to office.
Both the EU’s tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, and her competition colleague, Teresa Ribera, came out against the U.S. pressure this week, with the latter accusing Washington of “blackmail.”
The European Commission is also under pressure from European Parliament lawmakers, with the Socialists and Democrats group moving to set up an inquiry committee to investigate the EU’s enforcement of digital rules.
Responding to Macron’s remarks, European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said: “We have been very clear since the very beginning: We are fully behind our digital legislation and are enforcing it.”
He argued that “some cases take a bit more time than others, because the DSA investigations are broad.”
“The Commission services are building solid cases, because we have to win them in court,” he said.
The EU has investigations open under the DSA into X, Meta, AliExpress, Temu and TikTok. The probes could lead to fines of 6 percent of a company’s annual global turnover, but none have been levied so far.
