- Trump attacks fines imposed by the EU on American companies
- The new president said that fines are “a form of taxation”
- Apple, Meta and Google are currently facing heavy fines in the EU.
Following the call of the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, to the new President Trump to prevent American companies from paying the fines of the European Union, Trump attacked it, qualifying the fines of “form of taxation” .
Meta has been faced with $ 2.67 billion in fines under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) since 2022 for a certain number of reasons, notably the fact of not having ensured the security of information, of Do not have a legal basis for data processing and not generally comply with the GDPR.
The GDPR was introduced into the EU in 2018 and is designed to give the citizens of the EU more control over the data that can be collected, which can process their data and guarantee that they remain secure when processed outside the EU.
“Big complaints to the EU”
Speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum, Trump said (via Bloomberg), “These are American companies, whether you like it or not. They shouldn’t do that. It is, as far as I’m concerned, a form of taxation. We have very big complaints towards the EU. ”
Many of the richest men in the world and owners of technological conglomerates, including Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook, were present at Trump’s inauguration, and all donated seven figures to Trump’s inauguration fund . Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), would have spent more than $ 277 million to help Trump elect.
Apple, Meta and Google have all been sentenced to heavy fines for breaking the EU regulations in the past, the European Commission is finalizing today a first survey on X with a fine of the order of a million Dollars likely to be imposed on the social media platform.
In 2023 Meta was sentenced to a fine of $ 1.3 billion for transferring EU user data to the United States. Google had to pay a fine of $ 1.6 billion for anti -competitive policies in 2019. Apple had to pay a fine of $ 2 billion for abusing the App Store to prevent musical streaming services from competing Apple Apple Apple Music.
The three companies are currently subject to investigations under European digital markets, violations resulting in a fine of up to 10 % of world annual turnover. It should be noted that the United States does not have complete federal regulations on data confidentiality, only 20 American states currently applying national data protection regulations.
