Facebook’s Zuckerberg grilled as European politicians signal strong stance on consumer privacy

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Mark Zuckerberg confronted a hostile European Parliament on Tuesday as politicians grilled the Facebook chief executive on whether his company is a monopoly that has become a threat to democracy and should be broken up.

The Silicon Valley billionaire managed to dodge many of the questions posed to him during the informal, 90-minute gathering with members of the Parliament’s Conference of Presidents in Brussels. However, the meeting is the clearest signal yet that European regulators, who have a long track record of going after tech powerhouses, are planning to strike a more aggressive position toward the industry than their counterparts in the United States.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s visit to Brussels, part of a European tour that includes a planned meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, comes amid continuing public scrutiny over how Facebook uses data collected from its billions of global users as well as what role it may have played in shaping the outcome of democratic elections.

But while U.S. regulators so far have done little legislatively after Mr. Zuckerberg spent two days testifying before Congress in Washington last month, European politicians are keen to portray themselves as the world’s consumer privacy watchdogs.

“We are the regulators,” European Parliament president Antonio Tajani said. “We need to define as soon as possible a set of rules that will allow for the proper functioning of the digital market.”

Several politicians questioned whether Facebook was abusing its dominant position as the world’s largest social network.

Manfred Weber, a German politician who serves as leader of the European People’s Party in Brussels, challenged Mr. Zuckerberg to provide the names of competitors to Facebook in Europe. “I think it’s time to discuss breaking Facebook’s monopoly, because it’s already too much power in only one hand,” he said. “Can you convince me not to do so?”

Guy Verhofstadt, a Belgian MEP who leads the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, reminded Mr. Zuckerberg that he has already apologized “15 or 16 times in the last decade” for Facebook’s past missteps.

Pointing to a petition signed by more than 1 million European citizens demanding that Facebook be regulated, Mr. Verhofstadt pressed the CEO to work with European competition investigators. “Would you co-operate with anti-trust authorities and open your books so we can see if, yes or no, there is a monopoly?” he asked.

Mr. Zuckerberg argued that Facebook is constantly changing to fend off competition from emerging new digital-communication services. “From where I sit, it feels like there are new competitors coming up every day,” he said. He argued that rather than suppressing competition, Facebook allows small businesses to access the same digital marketing and advertising tools once available only to large companies. “It’s something that levels the playing field,” he said.

The televised gathering comes just days before the European Union’s 28 member states are set to enact new sweeping consumer privacy legislation. The General Data Protection Regulation imposes new rules on companies that collect data on European citizens, with steep fines for non-compliance.

European regulators have flexed their muscles before. The EU’s powerful competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, has been setting her sights on big technology companies. She previously fined Facebook €110-million ($166-million) for misleading statements about its acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp, slapped Google with a massive €2.4-billion ($3.6-billion) fine for abusing its position as the internet’s dominant search engine to favour its own comparison shopping service and ordered Apple to pay €13-billion ($19-billion) in unpaid taxes.

The moves are part of a long list of actions by European regulators against U.S.-based tech giants. A decade ago, the European Commission forced Microsoft to make changes to its Windows operating system and fined the company €860-million for abusing its monopoly position in desktop software.

In his responses to questions, which spanned just 25 minutes of the brief meeting, Mr. Zuckerberg apologized once more for the Cambridge Analytica controversy and said Facebook had been too slow to recognize Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

He said Facebook had already taken down 580 million fake accounts in the first three months of this year alone and suspended 200 apps as part of a review in the wake of revelations that political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly accessed personal information of millions of Facebook users.

He reiterated Facebook’s plans to increase its use of artificial intelligence to identify fake accounts and problem content and to double the number of people working on safety and security to 20,000 by the end of the year, changes he said would “significantly impact” the company’s profitability.

Some European politicians were angered by the format of the meeting, which allowed Mr. Zuckerberg to hear all questions in advance and then choose which ones to answer. The CEO agreed to follow up in writing to many of the questions and offered to send a company representative to testify before a future hearing.

British parliamentarian Damian Collins called the meeting a “missed opportunity” and renewed his call for Mr. Zuckerberg to testify before a British House of Commons committee.