Issue 25 - July 25, 2026
- France saves its face on the social media youth ban but at the cost of no enforcement. - The Mistral-Microsoft deal helps Mistral further deploy its vision for Europe
Sébastien Louradour
7/23/20264 min read
France saves its face on the social media youth ban but at the cost of no enforcement.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a piece about the European Commission requesting France to review its youth ban so it meets the EU rules requirement. Two weeks later, the EU has presented a framework to ban social media for youth to confirm it was taking the lead from member states, and France had been able to adopt an updated version of the law to comply with the EU rules, which in practice would empty most of its substance. While the EC announcement was long awaited, the French turn around was hard to predict, with a new version that no longer mentions any form of enforcement. The final text of the French Assembly is indeed strikingly short given the length of the debates and the complexity of the issue. Banning youth under 15 from social media had never been the hard part, it was about who will check age: the platforms, the operating systems or a third party? What is a Social Media (is Youtube part of it? and what about WhatsApp?) and who to OK the right age verification tools so privacy is maintained? Not even mentioning who to enforce the whole ban. The result of that is confusing, President Macron has praised this first move in the EU to ban social media for youth, and it was indeed long awaited after Australia moved on first. What is likely to happen from there is an enforcement of the law transferred to the EU once Europe has adopted its own framework. No one really loses face, Macron has still a political win, and Europe eventually ends up becoming the de facto enforcer. In between, French parents, and schools will certainly feel empowered by the new law, and will become the real enforcer of it, telling teens that it's illegal to use social media for under 15. For social media companies, it's certainly not an optimal scenario either. With no enforcer and public opinion now waiting for them to implement the ban, they will need to figure out solutions without clear guidance, in a context where neither platforms nor operating systems want to take responsibility to verify the ages of teenagers. When it comes to the EU approach, it's clear that pressure from member states has played out, and the proposal presented by von der Leyen earlier this week is, when compared to the French law, a very delicate and thoughtful exercise meant to work. The EU avoids the word "ban", framing it instead as a "social media start date for minors". This proposal for a "harmonised EU-wide delay to social media" for under-13s is also a message to member states such as France that have pushed for national laws: the EU is now firmly taking the lead among the many member states that have initiated laws to ban youth from social media and confirms a growing consensus on the matter.
The Mistral-Microsoft deal helps Mistral further deploy its vision for Europe
Mistral has become over the past years the tech jewel of Europe along with ASML. Both play a global role in the supply of genAI, and while ASML, sustained by a very high level of engineering, has so far prevented any form of serious competition when it comes to chip printing, Mistral remains a fragile player that needs to compete both with the US frontier AI-labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic and Chinese open-weight AI models that are more and more aggressively competing with US closed-model ones. To succeed, Mistral can't just rely on EU public procurement push or commands from EU legacy leaders such as auto-makers, it needs to go global. The Microsoft-Mistral deal is a revealing example both for US tech companies willing to keep their footprint in Europe despite the strong anti-US tech and sovereignty push and for EU tech companies willing to play a role at global and not just regional level. The deal between the two tech players will help Mistral fund data centers in Europe, and make Mistral's open weight models available on Microsoft cloud and tools. Arthur Mensch has been advocating for EU sovereignty too, but by acknowledging EU's critical dependencies on foreign assets, starting with access to capital and more and more to compute. What is at stake is also Europe's capacity to allocate enough resources for R&D, which requires larger margins from EU champions often limited by access to national markets rather than an EU-wide market. Many of these issues require heavy political will from member states to consider the EU single market as a solution, but current political signals suggest no significant shift is imminent. In a long video interview (paywall) with the Economist, Arthur Mensch takes the time to repeat what he has already said a couple of weeks ago in a hearing with the French National Assembly focusing on tech dependencies and sovereignty: the most critical asset Europe needs to build on, is the capacity to transform energy into tokens, and that's exactly what the Mistral/Microsoft deal is about. At the heart of this partnership is a new multi-billion dollar agreement aimed at developing AI infrastructure in Europe. Mistral is expanding its GPU capacity with thousands of next-generation NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs to increase the availability of AI compute resources for customers. With this deal, Mistral has essentially become one of the few EU companies able to reach significant deals with US tech companies to help Europe build its own AI infrastructure by attracting capital there.