The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has urged the incoming US administration under new President Donald Trump to step in and stop the EU from fining US tech companies for non-compliance with antitrust laws and other violations. It was reported by Politico.
Speaking on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg complained that the EU has forced American tech companies operating in Europe to pay “more than $30 billion” in fines for violating the law over the past two decades.
“I think it’s a strategic advantage of the United States that we have many of the strongest companies in the world, and I think that should be part of the U.S. strategy to protect that,” Zuckerberg said.
“And that’s one of the things that I’m optimistic about with President Trump,” he added.
The Meta conglomerate, which runs Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other social media and communication platforms, received a 797 million euro fine last November for breaking EU antitrust laws by imposing unfair conditions on advertising service providers.
Zuckerberg argued that the European Commission’s application of competition rules is “almost a tariff” for US tech companies and said that the outgoing administration of US President Joe Biden has failed to deal with the situation.
“If some other country had hurt another industry that we care about, the U.S. government would probably find a way to put pressure on them, but I think what happened here is actually the exact opposite,” he said.
“The US government has led an attack on companies that has led to the EU, essentially everywhere else, being free to attack all American companies and do whatever they want with them,” Zuckerberg added.
In the spring of 2024, the EU regulators launched an investigation into whether Apple, Google, and Meta may have violated the new digital competition rules (DMA) aimed at preventing the monopolization of digital markets by large technology platforms.
The European Commission said it was investigating the companies for “non-compliance” with the law, the first cases after its adoption. It intends to complete the investigation within a year.
The EU executive body has received complaints that the technology companies’ compliance measures were insufficient.
Regulators are looking into whether Google and Apple are fully complying with the DMA rules, which require tech companies to allow app developers to direct users to cheaper options that are available outside their app stores.
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