E.U. Takes Aim at Social Media’s Harms With Landmark New Law

Yet even as the European authorities gain newfound legal powers to rein in the tech behemoths, critics wondered how effective they will be. Writing laws can be easier than enforcing them, and while the European Union has a reputation as the world’s toughest regulator of the tech industry, its actions have sometimes appeared tougher on paper than in practice.

An estimated 230 new workers will be hired to enforce the new laws, a figure that critics said was insufficient when compared with the resources available to Meta, Google and others.

The staffing figures “are totally inadequate to face gigantic firms and new gigantic tasks,” said Tommaso Valletti, a former top economist for the European Commission, who worked on antitrust cases against Google and other tech platforms.

Without robust enforcement, he said, the new laws will amount to an unfulfilled promise. Mr. Valletti said that even as Europe had levied multibillion-dollar antitrust rulings against Google in recent years, those actions had done little to restore competition because regulators did not force the company to make major structural changes.

Lack of enforcement of the European Union’s data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., has also cast a shadow over the new laws.

Like the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, G.D.P.R. was hailed as landmark legislation. But since it took effect in 2018, there has been little action against Facebook, Google and others over their data-collection practices. Many have sidestepped the rules by bombarding users with consent windows on their websites.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/technology/european-union-social-media-law.html