Vittorio Colao defends copyright rules and the DSA in Europe’s AI debate

Vittorio Colao — formerly chief executive of Vodafone, currently vice chairman for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at General Atlantic — took the stage at Wave by Vento in Turin to announce that regulation is holding back AI in Europe. A private-equity man telling a continent it has over-legislated is a bit like a gambler complaining the odds are rigged while sitting on the chips. His remedy, though, is the comedy: assess it rule by rule. That is not a regulatory philosophy, it's a deli counter — keep the salami, send back the herring.

Naturally, the salami he keeps are copyright rules and the Digital Services Act, both of which he defended. The herring is the EU AI Act, dismissed as 'good intentions, too complicated to implement.' Good intentions — the highest compliment available in Brussels and the lowest in Turin, and a review calibrated to insult without quite being quotable: lovely building, lovely staff, inedible food. Awkwardly, 'too complicated to implement' is also the most accurate sentence anyone has uttered about European AI policy in a year, which is precisely why it's coming from a man whose firm would like to deploy capital into the resulting gap.

This is the Frankfurt argument we covered earlier with a better suit and a Turin accent. There, Elizabeth Crossick of RELX called the AI Act 'market-access legislation'; here, Colao calls it unimplementable and asks to be judged provision by provision. Both requests end in the same place: leave the architecture standing, file down the bits with teeth, and let the private sector regulate by term sheet. The Act's defenders will say it is a floor, not a ceiling. Colao is politely walking the room, measuring where the floor can be lifted.