The European Union reached an agreement on Saturday targeting hate speech, disinformation and other harmful content on the Internet.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) is the second prong of EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager's strategy to curb the dominance of Alphabet's Google unit, formerly MetaFacebook, and other US tech giants.

"We have reached an agreement on the Digital Services Act, and the law will ensure that what is considered illegal in the absence of a network connection is also seen and treated as illegal over the network," Euronews quoted Vestager as saying on Twitter. 

The law would force big tech companies to monitor themselves more rigorously, make it easier for users to report problems, and the deal would enable regulators to penalize non-compliant companies with billions in fines.

The agreement focuses on new rules that require tech giants to do more to monitor content on their platforms, and pay fees to regulators that monitor their compliance.

Under the law, companies face fines of up to 6 percent of their global sales for breaching the rules, while repeated breaches could result in them being banned from doing business in the European Union.