Chapel Hill (United States) (AFP) – The Vice-President of the European Commission Henna Virkkunen on Wednesday put into perspective the differences between Brussels and Washington on the regulation of tech, believing that American justice ended up obtaining from companies what Europe rather imposes on them by law.

Published on: 03/09/2026 - 07:47

“In practice, the differences are not that big,” the commissioner responsible for technological sovereignty told AFP, on the sidelines of the G20 ministerial meeting on innovation in the United States, in North Carolina.

“In Europe, we have upstream regulation, and in the United States, this often involves litigation,” she explained. “The same companies, the same practices, are the subject of investigations and debates.”

The commissioner spoke after two days of sessions during which ministers heard from figures in the sector, such as the boss of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, or Elon Musk, who took advantage of this platform to reiterate their criticism against the regulation of new technologies in Europe, considered excessive.

A postulate that the Finnish manager rejects: “We do not consider, and I do not consider, that innovation and regulation are opposed.”

She cited a recent Eurobarometer survey, in which 80% of Europeans surveyed consider rigorous supervision of AI important, in the name of security.

“For Europeans, it is important to be able to trust these technologies,” she defended, while recalling that Brussels was preparing simplifications of certain rules.

Protection of minors

The absence of federal legislation on tech in the United States does not leave the industry without constraints, she noted: “At the (American) state level, there are now hundreds of rules on AI. This is the situation that we wanted to avoid with our AI Act” and, from now on, “we have a single rule for the entire market”.

For Ms Virkkunen, the clearest transatlantic convergence concerns the protection of minors on social networks.

Meta concluded a historic agreement at the end of August with almost all American states, committing to establishing, among other things, nighttime curfews and time limits for adolescents on Instagram and Facebook.

Some of the provisions accepted by Meta already have their equivalent in European law, she stressed, via the Digital Services Regulation (DSA), which requires platforms to allow the reporting of illegal content and the choice of recommendation system.

However, curfews and time limits do not exist in European legislation. But Brussels shares the fundamental concern about the potentially addictive nature of the platforms, a subject which has earned Meta, YouTube and TikTok thousands of lawsuits in the United States.

The Commission published preliminary findings in July on the addictive design of Meta's services and, shortly before, on how the group verifies that its users are at least 13 years old. She made similar remarks to TikTok and opened an investigation targeting Snapchat in the spring.

“We are ready to further tighten the rules in Europe on this subject, but I think the platforms could already do a lot more right now,” she said.

-"Respect our rules"-

On AI security, Ms Virkkunen recalled that the sanctioning powers attached to the AI ​​Act, the European legislation on the subject, came into force in August, and that most major developers were already cooperating voluntarily with the Commission.

“They understand that, to operate on the European market, they must respect our rules,” she said.

Asked about the possibility that the American revolt against data centers would win over European citizens, she stressed that the debate was already lively in certain countries but that rigorous planning should precisely avoid it, according to her.

The official described an imbalance within the EU, with manufacturers favoring countries with clean, abundant and cheap energy.

“It is not a good solution that they are concentrated in a few countries,” she concluded, “we need them in all of them, because they constitute an essential component of our digital infrastructure.”

© 2026 AFP

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