PARIS—French President Emmanuel Macron ratcheted up demands on U.S. tech giants Thursday by calling on them to embrace European regulations, ranging from taxation to privacy to artificial intelligence, because Washington is failing to do so.
“The U.S. model is no longer sustainable because there is no political accountability,” Mr. Macron told at a tech conference in Paris just hours before Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg took the same stage.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who had met Wednesday with Mr. Macron, struck a conciliatory tone during his appearance, saying the tech sector is now “making sure we take more responsibility,” and said that Europe’s new GDPR privacy law, which goes into effect on Friday, can help “increase public trust that these systems are working.”
Mr. Zuckerberg added that, in recent weeks, “the vast majority of people choose to opt in” when Facebook has asked them to approve its use of their use of internet browsing and application usage data to show them targeted ads.
Mr. Macron’s broadside—which he began by saying, “I will be very blunt with you”—is part of a broader political backlash in Europe and elsewhere against the power and influence of a handful of global tech titans. Detractors accuse the firms of a litany of offenses including contributing to income inequality by concentrating wealth and helping undermine democratic discourse with social media tools.
Mr. Macron has appointed himself—and France—as a mediator that can find a common ground between the companies and their critics. On one hand, Mr. Macron has wooed investments from tech firms with tax cuts and business-friendly reforms of labor laws. But he has also encouraged them to take more responsibility—inviting some 50 CEOs from firms including Uber Technologies Inc., Microsoft Corp, and International Business Machines Corp. to a summit on Wednesday that he called “Tech for Good.”
In his comments Thursday, Mr. Macron sought to draw a line between what he described as authoritarian rule with few social protections in China, and a U.S. model that he says has abdicated responsibility for Western social values.
“What is at stake is how we build a European model reconciling innovation and the common good. That’s our challenge,” he said.
Mr. Zuckerberg, for his part, indicated that he has been studying governance models, including the idea of due process, in an effort to make Facebook more accountable to its users. Under pressure from governments to remove extremist content and hate speech, Facebook plans to introduce features allowing individuals to appeal those removals, including appeals to an outside panel of people who do not work for Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg said.
“What I’d like to get to is to have somewhat of a supreme court, or a higher appellate court that’s more independent,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
One complaint Mr. Macron repeatedly made was some big tech firms not paying enough income tax, by using legal structures to shift profits to lower-tax countries. He said he would continue to fight for a French proposal that the European Union levy a tax on large tech firms’ digital revenue in order to level the playing field—even though the proposal has had trouble garnering the unanimity among EU nations that it would need to become law.
“You created a huge wave disrupting sectors of the economy,” Mr. Macron told the tech executives in the audience. “That’s why I am a strong supporter for this European digital tax for big players and I will fight for it to the end. I think it’s fair.”
Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com
