Meta’s Clegg tries to shame EU into dismantling consumer protections
Europe is lagging in technology, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), according to Nick Clegg, president for global affairs at Meta Platforms.
Speaking to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Clegg said the continent “has a huge problem. All the big AI companies are Chinese and American. Almost all of the top hundred companies in Europe were founded over 40 years ago”.
If he also mentioned that water is wet, the Corriere did not report it.
Of course, Clegg was actually touting Meta’s investment in AI start-ups to be based in Paris at Station F, a former train shed transformed into a start-up marshalling yard (in my opinion the worst place in Paris, where the densest people on Earth go to pay too much for sub-par food while pretending to work). Start-ups that will use Meta’s large language model (LLM) AI technology, of course.
Why anyone would listen to Clegg, best-known for his work as the assistant manager of the team that asset-stripped Britain, is a different question altogether. Indeed, Clegg and Co. are responsible for the disastrously self-destructive, and entirely voluntary, austerity scheme that scarred the country and ground economic growth to a halt. Since those halcyon days, Clegg has simply shifted from carrying water for Britain’s Conservative party to carrying water for the world’s second largest data vacuum.
In fact, Europe does lag in tech – something that this publication has noted more than once – but the cause is not ‘overregulation’ so much as a lazy reliance on US, and increasingly Chinese, technology and what effectively amounts to a capital strike on the part of investors.
Back in the mists of time, Europe was home to many significant technology companies, from France’s Bull to Germany’s Nixdorf and Italy’s Olivetti. A few remain: Germany’s SAP, Britain’s Sage, ASML in the Netherlands and, of course, the French technology odd-job company Atos.
Even Britain’s late, lamented Acorn, a relative minnow even in its time, today has a significant echo in the form of Arm Holdings, which designs the core of the world’s most commonly-used CPU.
But let’s be honest here: neither Meta nor any other multinational tech behemoth has any particular interest in the European technology landscape, other than the interest every dominant global operation has: the ability to buy-up smaller companies and either use their technology or kill them off before they become a threat.
So if Clegg, “as a European” doesn’t want his children to “use artificial intelligence trained on data from California or Iowa, but on data relevant to my culture,” as Corriere reported, what does he want? It’s impossible to say for sure, of course, but it sounds an awful lot like he wants the EU to back off and let US capital rip on Europeans’ personal data.
A report in the Irish Times records Clegg saying that while regulation of AI “had its place,” in Europe too much emphasis was placed on regulations.
“Given its sheer size, the European Union should do more to try and catch up with the adoption and development of new technologies in the US and not confuse taking a lead on regulation with taking a lead on the technology,” he said
In other words, regulators should just go away and let giant businesses do whatever they like.
This is not a new narrative. In May, executives from both Meta and Amazon said the EU’s forthcoming AI Act could harm innovation. Apple’s ongoing travails in Europe, meanwhile, are a clear demonstration that laws can indeed act as an impediment to foreign businesses riding roughshod over citizens’ rights. Forsooth etc.
Europe does need to get its act together on technology, that much is true. But a narrow focus on slashing regulations will do nothing to increase real investment in real businesses doing real things. The success of Europe’s auto industry, which has held its own in face of serious onslaughts from abroad, demonstrates that the answer is not to allow a free-for-all, which would only benefit the importers anyway, but to actually stump up the necessary cash to build businesses.
In the meantime, it is increasingly obvious that the tech giants, all of them, are worried about EU regulation. Good.
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