The European Union is bracing for an onslaught of lawsuits from the largest tech companies, Google, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Apple over incoming rules that will change how the industry operates, said the head of the region’s new San Francisco outpost.
“We’re not naïve,” Gerard de Graaf, a top EUofficial focused on regulations for digital platforms, told Bloomberg News in his first interview with a US media outlet since opening the EU’s office in the heart of Silicon Valley last month. “There will be litigation.”
The new West Coast office is the latest initiative to improve the trans-Atlantic relationship after the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council was created last year to work out differences over trade and technology policy.
The new office will be headed up by Gerard de Graaf, a senior EU diplomat who has been involved in two landmark pieces of legislation passed this year.
The first of those, the Digital Services Act, has wide-reaching implications for the digital services sector, especially social media companies. Among other things, the act will ban targeted advertising aimed at children and will allow European governments to tell social media companies to take down illegal content and specify their ability to fine companies that fail to do so.
The second new regulation, the Digital Markets Act, deals with anti-competitive behavior, a concern that has been behind a string of EU antitrust cases against Big Tech in recent years.
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