Big Tech to Face More Restrictions in Europe on Data, AI - The Wall Street Journal

Big Tech to Face More Restrictions in Europe on Data, AI - The Wall Street Journal

Google's office in Berlin. The EU plans to place more restrictions on artificial intelligence.

Photo: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg News

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Valentina Pop

Valentina Pop
The Wall Street Journal
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• valentina.pop@wsj.com

Updated Feb. 19, 2020 8:54 am ET

BRUSSELS—American tech companies will face new restrictions in the European Union on artificial intelligence and on the alleged use of data to drive out smaller rivals, as the bloc seeks to assert its “digital sovereignty” from the U.S. and China.

EU regulators unveiled plans Wednesday aimed at placing more restrictions on machine learning-enabled technologies in fields ranging from public surveillance cameras to cancer scans and self-driving cars.

The legislation, to be drafted by the end of 2020, is also likely to home in on what the EU has learned from antitrust cases against Alphabet Inc.’s Google and ongoing probes into Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. : how these platforms allegedly use data to quash smaller rivals. These technology giants—which some U.S. politicians such as Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren want to regulate as public utilities—are in the firing line of the coming EU legislation.

Liability rules regarding the content shared on online platforms are also due to be spelled out in the Digital Services Act by the end of the year. EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said Monday that a pledge by Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to accept a degree of liability for content posted was insufficient, because he didn’t address the issue of dominant platforms having responsibilities toward smaller players on the platform.

The rules will also come with new restrictions for U.S. and Chinese companies that develop machine-learning-enabled technologies, particularly when they handle sensitive data such as medical records or facial images.

Restrictions are likely to be placed on the use of facial recognition tools for mass surveillance, to limit the number of individuals targeted. Human oversight and disclosure requirements on which data sets are used by AI will be put on all companies operating in the EU.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, said Europe was behind the U.S. and China in terms of consumer-oriented applications and platforms. However, it hopes to attract public and private investments of €20 billion ($21.6 billion) a year in a bid to keep up in the industrial and public sectors with the use of big data and AI.

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“Europe has everything it takes to lead the ‘big data’ race, and preserve its technological sovereignty,” said Mr. Breton.

If a technology tested in Europe proves to be too opaque or fails to comply with the rules in place, regulators may order the company to reboot the AI and make it learn from scratch based on different data before rollout.

In December, EU Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager was promoted to a dual role of enforcing competition law and shaping new rules for the tech sector. After fining Google over $9 billion for anticompetitive behavior over the past three years, Ms. Vestager admitted that fines weren’t working and a broader regulatory approach was needed to change the behavior of big tech.

“She has learned that data is the fundamental issue and that what she’s done so far has not worked,” said Thomas Vinje, a partner at law firm Clifford Chance. Regulating how platforms use data “is the natural thing to do, but how this will be done still needs to be defined.”

Write to Valentina Pop at valentina.pop@wsj.com

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2020-02-19 13:54:00Z
https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-tech-to-faces-more-restrictions-in-europe-on-data-ai-11582111937
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