The United States and European Union plan to take a more unified approach to limit the market power wielded by big tech companies. The news comes from a draft memo. The move will likely be among announcements made on supply chain, trade, climate, and tech at a US-EU Trade and Technology Council meeting on September 29th in Pittsburgh.
With the US and Europe working together to limit the power of big tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet, cooperation has become important for regulators.
The trade council meeting
With cooperation, regulators on both sides of the pond can make it harder for the US tech industry to fight new legislation, which they have done successfully in many cases in the recent past.
This month, the White House announced that the council would meet for the first time on September 29 in Pittsburgh. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, and the EU’s trade chief Valdis Dombrovski, will all be in attendance.
The European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager is scheduled to attend too.
A unified approach could change things
The White House is coordinating with various agencies on the meeting and declined to comment on the memo. The big tech companies mentioned have not made a statement about this yet.
The memo says that the group focused on tech company regulation will exchange information on respective approaches to governing tech platforms and converging where feasible.
Multiple examples of where EU-US regulation syncing could be useful include Google, which is facing legal action in the bloc and the US, regarding its advertising business and ad technology. Big tech doesn’t want to be under the stricter EU laws, which is making it harder to do business in the EU, with EU companies, or handle EU citizens’ data. It remains to be seen what the meeting will yield.
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