LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - French President Emmanuel Macron addressed an audience at the Vivatech conference in Paris and accused the US of not being tough enough on tech firms, saying its regulatory regime was insufficient to make them "politically accountable".
Sitting in the audience was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who had to answer to the European Union earlier this week after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where millions of users' data was leaked and used to manipulate the 2016 US presidential contest.

Macron claims that although the US model of 'light touch' regulation is good for start-ups and innovation, it's necessary to regulate larger films which wield significant influence over the public.

He also criticised the wide gap which existed between European and US regulations.

Although US officials grilled Zuckerberg over the scandal in March, they had not proposed a new set of new rules to prevent the incident from happening again, on the other hand the EU is set to put in place the harshest privacy rules in the world to date (the GDPR).

The French president said, "For me, the U.S. model is not sustainable because there's no political accountability. On the other side, you have a very strong Chinese model. But this model has not the same values as the ones we have. It is over-centralized."

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