The EU has vowed it will not back down from enforcing its stringent rules to protect Europeans online. "This is an essential step also to protect users across the EU from certain of these practices, and to make sure that platforms in the EU also play their role," EU digital affairs spokesman Thomas Regnier told reporters in Brussels. The EU rejects such claims, stressing that whatever is illegal in the real world is also illegal in the online realm. Defenders of the bloc's tech rules have meanwhile attacked the EU for failing to complete its probe into Musk's X, which opened in December 2023. EU digital chief Henna Virkkunen told AFP last week that probes into online platforms including X will be completed in the "coming weeks and months".