Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Europe Is Right to Call Facebook a TV Company

The social media giant shouldn't have an unfair advantage against legacy competitors.

May 25, 2017 at 3:09 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Laws are a necessary nuisance.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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There is a clear tendency in the European Union to call the bluff of U.S. tech companies and regulate them in the same way as legacy companies in the same industries. That may sound retrograde, but it's an approach that goes to the heart of the difference between Europe and the U.S. when it comes to technological progress.

This week, a meeting of EU nations' ministers agreed that the rules that were written for television broadcasters, such as those banning hate speech and the propaganda of violence and terrorism, should also apply to social networks with a lot of video content and to on-demand video services such as Netflix. This approach may soon become EU law if the European Parliament approves it, and it's highly likely to do so.