LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - The European Union's new executive will not grant America's tech giants any tax relief and will devise new laws to regulate the companies and artificial intelligence technology, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

Its executive arm, the European Commission, was said to be in the process of gathering evidence against the Silicon Valley giants and expected to announce new laws governing the use of artificial intelligence in the first 100 days after President Ursula von der Leyen and her team take office on 1 November.

Competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager had already launched anti-trust investigations into so-called 'Big Tech' and fines levied against Facebook, but that could turn out to be just the start.

In response, a spokeswoman for Facebook said: "We want to work with governments and policymakers to design the sort of smart regulation that fosters competition, encourages innovation and protects consumers."

Alphabet's Google had also already been hit with $9.4bn in fines resulting from three separate EU investigations with a fourth underway.

Indeed, criticism of Big Tech had done nothing but grow since the Commission first sued Google for anti-competitive practices in 2015 and after Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, leading to a public debate about whether such large monopolistic corporations should be broken up.

Email this article to a friend

or share it with one of these popular networks:

• DIGG
• FACEBOOK
• STUMBLEUPON
• MIXX
• YAHOO BUZZ
• DELICIOUS
• REDDIT
• NEWSVINE