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The U.S. government under incoming President Donald Trump should intervene to stop the EU from fining American tech companies for breaching antitrust rules and committing other violations, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said late Friday.
“I think it’s a strategic advantage for the United States that we have a lot of the strongest companies in the world, and I think it should be part of the U.S. strategy going forward to defend that,” Zuckerberg said during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
“And it’s one of the things that I’m optimistic about with President Trump,” he added. The U.S. president-elect appeared on the same program on the eve of November’s American presidential election and cited Rogan’s endorsement as a factor in his support among voters. “I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said about Trump.
Zuckerberg complained that the EU had forced U.S. tech companies operating in Europe to pay “more than $30 billion” in penalties for legal violations over the past two decades. Last November, the tech chief’s Meta conglomerate, which operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other social media and communications platforms, was fined €797 million for breaching EU antitrust rules by imposing unfair trading conditions on ads service providers.
Zuckerberg argued that the European Commission’s application of competition rules is “almost like a tariff” on American tech companies and said that U.S. President Joe Biden’s outgoing administration had failed to deal with the situation.
“If some other country was screwing with another industry that we cared about, the U.S. government would probably find some way to put pressure on them, but I think what happened here is actually the complete opposite,” he said. “The U.S. government led the kind of attack against the companies, which then just made it so the EU is basically in all these other places, just free to just go to town on all the American companies and do whatever you want.”
Zuckerberg’s appearance on Rogan’s podcast comes just days after he announced that Meta will end its third-party fact-checking program and move to a so-called community notes model. The move has been widely interpreted as an attempt by Zuckerberg to ingratiate himself with the incoming Trump administration, which has long denounced the moderation policy as censorship with a left-wing bias.
Acknowledging the changing “legal and policy landscape,” Meta on Friday also said that it would terminate its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
