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| Fri 15 November 2024 | View online
Estimated reading time: 8-9 minutes |
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Thank you for joining us for our daily Tech Pro briefing. Today, we are bringing you a roundup of the most important tech news from the EU and around the world.
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| | | | Finally, a CoP for GPAI draft |
| The first draft of the Code of Practice (CoP) for general-purpose artificial intelligence (GPAI) providers was published today (14 November), mandating third-party audits and comprehensive risk mitigation plans for models posing systemic risks. Stakeholders need to quickly analyse the draft, with short deadlines looming. (Read more) |
| Finally, a decision on Facebook Marketplace |
| The European Commission has fined Meta €797.72 million for breaching antitrust rules in the way it ties up Facebook Marketplace to the synonymous social media platform, according to a press release on Thursday. (Read more) |
| | 🟡 Artificial intelligence |
| | Prohibitions consultation. The Commission launched a four-week consultation on prohibited AI practices and how to define AI on Wednesday. The consultation will feed into Commission guidelines, to be published ideally some time before the looming 2 February entry into force of the prohibitions. The consultation is also very high level, without any draft guidelines to comment on, despite a more detailed document circulating within the Commission, two people following the process told Euractiv.
First AI Factories. The Commission has received seven proposals from 15 member states to build AI Factories, it announced on Monday. Finland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Greece and Spain submitted the proposals, with the proposals from Finland and Italy representing several states. Selection is expected in December, and Commission Executive Vice President-designate Henna Virkkunen has promised to have “at least five” launched within the first 100 days of her mandate, to the disappointment of stakeholders seeking more concentrated efforts. Poland’s priorities. The Polish Deputy Minister for Digitalisation, Dariusz Standerski, said on Thursday in Brussels that the upcoming Polish Presidency of the Council of the EU will focus on implementing the AI Act and boost investment in the sector. Standerski said Poland wants to go “further than EuroHPC and AI Factories programmes” and work on AI energy consumption. Standerski also sees AI as a good way to cut red tape. Diminishing returns. Orion, OpenAI’s upcoming model sees less increase in performance relative to GPT-4 than GPT-3, The Information reported on Sunday. Previous chief scientist at OpenAI Ilya Sutskever toldReuters that “everyone is looking for the next thing” given that naive scaling has plateaued. China catching up? Alibaba’s Qwen2-Coder openly available model beats OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on 9 of 12 coding benchmarks, a Tuesday statement from the company said. Council on AILD. The Council’s Working Party on Civil Law Matters discussed the AI liability directive on Monday. According to MLex, many countries find it redundant, with France, Italy and Denmark being especially vocal in their opposition. Denmark in focus. Amnesty International accused Denmark of using algorithms that discriminate against certain groups, violate GDPR and constitutes "social scoring" prohibited under the AI Act, in a report published on Tuesday. Meanwhile, an alliance of companies and government agencies in Denmark launched a white paper and network to implement AI Agents in line with the AI Act, aiming to expand the approach and cooperation outside Denmark’s borders. ASML’s strong potential. Dutch manufacturer of chip making equipment, ASML, upheld its forecast of strong revenue growth by 2030 in its investor day on Thursday. The firm expects revenue to be between €44 billion and €60 billion with a gross margin of between 56% and 60%, according to a statement.
$125 million for AI software. UK startup Tessl, which builds AI software, raised $125 million (€117 million) in two funding rounds from Index Ventures, boldstart, GV, and Accel, the firm said on Thursday. TSMC tightening. TSMC told Chinese customers it would stop manufacturing advanced seven nanometre AI chips as of Monday, FTreported last Friday. It was a result of a letter from the US Department of Commerce, Reutersreported on Sunday. |
| | | | Time for compliance. Booking.com, designated as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act in May, must comply with the Digital Markets Act as of Thursday, the Commission reminded the Brussels bubble in a press release. Parity clauses and data access are among the EU executive’s chief concerns.
Federal eyes on Google. The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is looking to place Google under its supervision, meaning its financial products and services would face similar scrutiny as banks, The Washington Postreported on Friday citing two people familiar with the discussions.
Vodafone wins. On Wednesday, the General Court of the Court of Justice of the EU upheld the 2019 Commission decision to allow Vodafone to acquire sole control of telecommunications activities of Liberty Global in four EU countries. German companies Deutsche Telekom, Tele Columbus and Netcologne, brought an action of annulment in front of the court considering the Commission made errors in its assessment. |
| | | | A second Polish Presidency priority. Poland’s Standerski, said on Thursday in Brussels that the upcoming Polish Presidency will focus on enhancing cooperation between cyber organisations in the EU, as foreseen in the NIS2 directive. Broad and significant. A joint investigation by the FBI and the US Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Agency found a “broad and significant cyber espionage campaign” by Chinese state-backed actors into US commercial telecom systems, the two agencies said in a Wednesday statement. Biden on cybercrime. The US Biden administration plans to back a controversial UN cybercrime treaty, Bloombergreported on Monday. |
| | | | Franco-German Google. Ecosia, the Berlin based search engine planting trees through ad revenue and Qwant, the French privacy-centred search engine, announced last Friday that the will join forces in 2025 through a joint-venture to develop a European search index. Ecosia and Qwant have been based in the past on Microsoft’s Bing and Google search results. Dutch fine for AI use. The Netherlands Data Protection Authority (AP) concluded on Monday that the Dutch agency for education had infringed the GDPR in using an AI algorithm designed to detect fraud on student scholarships. The DPA found that the AI algorithm targeted specific groups of people based on types of education, distance, and age in an unlawful and discriminatory manner. The Ministry of Education is now expected to correct the issue. |
| | | | Delayed appointments. Virkkunen’s and Teresa Ribera Rodríguez’s appointments as Executive Vice Presidents of the Commission have been delayed to next week, amid a political spat. (Read more)
Tech sovereignty hearing. Virkkunen, the executive vice-president-designate for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy, was unfazed by the questions asked by MEPs at her confirmation hearing, embracing pro-investment and simplification stances on Tuesday. (Read more)
Trump, Musk, and DOGE. US President-elect Donald Trump announced a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to be led by Elon Musk and entrepreneur Civek Ramaswamy in a letter on Wednesday. DOGE will be “potentially be” a “Manhattan Project” to restructure the government and reduce inefficiencies, the letter said. DOGE will run until 4 July, 2026. "This will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” Musk posted on X on Thursday. Elon Musk’s PAC spent around $200 million to help the Trump campaign, and is preparing for midterms, APreported. From Commission to quantum firm. Previous chief economist of the cloud & software unit at the European Commission's DG CONNECT, Alexandra Paul, has been appointed Global Public Policy Lead in Brussels of French quantum startup Pasqal. Preparing for the Poles. The European Economic and Social Committee is holding a conference on the social and economic consequences of digital transformation in the run-up to the Polish EU Presidency on Monday.
Macron’s new purpose? President Macron is mulling becoming the internal champion of EU’s digital rulebook, Euractiv learned. Following Trump’s election last week and expected pushbacks on the enforcement of EU’s digital rulebooks by the upcoming US administration, Macron is mulling to take the leadership on international fora to promote and defend EU’s digital rulebook. President Macron has been focusing on international affairs since July’s snap election did not turn on his favour and cut him out of current French politics |
| | | | Gaia-X 5th summit. Gaia-X summit took place on Thursday and Friday in Helsinki and focused on global collaboration and the economic aspects of data-sharing. Call to refocus Gaia-X. The cloud providers lobby CISPE called on Thursday to refocus Gaia-X priorities on deploying Gaia-X requirements. Gaia-X should foster private and public organisations to include its labels and frameworks within their future call-to-tenders, said CISPE in a press release. This would benefit the entire European industry, they wrote. |
| | | | Less personalised. Meta announced its latest attempt to appease EU regulators in the area of personalised advertising on Tuesday, which includes an option for “less personalised advertising” for EU users of Facebook and Instagram.
Apple’s geo-blocking. The Commission has notified Apple of several potentially prohibited geo-blocking practices in the App Store, Apple Arcade, Music, iTunes Store, Books and Podcasts, according to a Tuesday press release. Working with the Consumer Protection Network, the Commission found issues with how Apple manages online access, payments, and downloading.
Dark patterns. Current EU regulations, specifically the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, are enough to address dark patterns if implemented correctly, said lobbies Ecommerce Europe, EuroCommerce, and Independent Retail Europe in a study published on Friday.
Goodbye X. The Guardian said it will stop posting on X on Wednesday. “The benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere,” editorial staff said in a statement. The US election underlined that X is “a toxic media platform” that Musk uses to shape political discourse, they wrote. TikTok <3 Republicans. Top leaders at TikTok insisted on a major shift in content moderation principles to make the platform more appealing to Trump and his supporters more than a year before the election, The Informationreported on Monday. Tiktok hopes Trump will stop the US Tiktok ban set to apply from January, Bloombergreported last Friday. Contrary to his 2020 crusade against TikTok, Trump has now said he thinks the ban is a bad idea. The firm ramped up its hiring of Chinese employees in the US in 2023, despite the scrutiny, Business Insiderreported on Tuesday. Questions for Amazon. The e-commerce and cloud giant was called into a closed-door meeting at the US Congress in September to answer questions about its growing relationship with TikTok, Bloombergreported on Thursday. Concerns centre around a shopping partnership announced in August. Deepfakes battle. X is challenging a California law that aims to prevent deepfakes in a lawsuit, Bloombergreported on Friday. A buyer for Infowars. The parent company of satirical site The Onion bought Alex Jones’s Infowars, a platform known for spreading misinformation, said CEO Bryce P. Tetraeder in a Thursday statement. No IPO for Vinted. Europe’s largest second-hand marketplace for clothes, Lithuanian Vinted, will not seek an IPO in the US, Bloombergreported on Friday. The firm was valued at €5 billion ($5.29 billion) as of October according to Bloomberg. |
| | | | Space competition. Musk’s SpaceX would face antitrust headwinds if it operated in Europe, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said on Thursday according to Reuters. |
| | | | | DT results. Deutsche Telekom posted strong financial results for the third quarter of 2024 on Thursday, including steady revenue growth in the US, Europe, and Germany. |
| | What else we’re reading this week: |
| Europe’s Tech Startups Staggered by Lilium, Northvolt ‘Disaster’ (Bloomberg) Global crypto market tops $3 trillion on hopes of Trump-fuelled boom (Reuters) Painting by A.I.-Powered Robot Sells for $1.1 Million (The New York Times) |
| | | | | | | Today’s brief was brought to you by Euractiv’s Tech team |
| | | | Today’s briefing was prepared by the Tech team: Eliza Gkritsi, Théophane Hartmann, and Jacob Wulff Wold. Share your feedback or information with us at digital@euractiv.com. |
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