Regulators in the EU are temporarily pausing making decisions and imposing fines on US megatechs for potentially breaching EU rules, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Sources have told the Financial Times the bloc is now “reassessing” the scale of its investigations into tech giants such as Apple, Meta and Google, and could possibly change the probes’ direction. One source confirmed that Trump’s return was a factor behind the EU’s decision to reassess the situation, though they stayed short of saying it actually triggered the move.
Not surprisingly, the heads of most major US tech giants attended President Trump’s inauguration on Monday, with some even getting seats on the inaugural platform.
And the expectation is that those bosses, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai, will ask President Trump to protect them from what they call an overzealous EU regulation.
One senior EU diplomat told the FT: “It’s going to be a whole new ballgame with these tech oligarchs so close to Trump and using that to pressurise us. So much is up in the air right now.”
The EU, under its Digital Markets Act, has started a number of probes into major US tech giants for potential non-compliance with local rules since March 2024.
The Act “establishes a set of clearly defined objective criteria to qualify a large online platform as a ‘gatekeeper’ and ensures that they behave in a fair way online and leave room for contestability.”
What has changed?
In recent years, tech firms were facing increasingly strict regulations, both in the US and the EU. A number of enforcement actions resulted in heavy fines, such as the $2.6 billion levied on Google by the EU in 2017 and upheld by the European Court of Justice last year.
Firms such as Apple, Google and Meta, who have been on the radar of US regulators too, felt the previous US government was not doing enough to protect them against aggressive EU regulations. To change the dynamics in their favor, they heavily invested in and lobbied for Donald Trump in the US presidential election. And they now expect him to pay back.
There are signs that the bet is about to pay off. Close Trump ally and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently wrote in a blog: “Regulation should be implemented only if its benefits outweigh its costs.”
Trump’s vice-president JD Vance was more blunt last autumn. He warned the EU the US could pull its support for NATO if regulators in the bloc didn’t stop its investigations into X, owned by Trump’s close ally Elon Musk.
Not long ago, Donald Trump was banned on platforms such as Twitter (now X) and Facebook. Now, he has joined hands with their bosses to take on EU regulators.
According to José Ignacio Torreblanca, a geopolitics and technology expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations: “They come from very different angles and positions into this debate, but their interests have converged.”
The probes
In March 2024, the the European Commission started investigations under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) against Alphabet, Apple and Meta, “because of concerns that the measures these gatekeepers put in place fall short of effective compliance of their obligations under the DMA.”
In relation to Google (Alphabet) and Apple, the Commission’s investigations focused on “whether the measures they implemented in relation to their obligations pertaining to app stores are in breach of the DMA, which requires gatekeepers to allow app developers to ‘steer’ consumers to offers outside the gatekeepers’ app stores, free of charge.”
And with Meta, EU regulators wanted to assess “whether the recently introduced ‘pay or consent’ model for users in the EU complies with the DMA, which requires gatekeepers to obtain consent from users when they intend to combine or cross-use their personal data.”
X (formerly Twitter) is also facing investigations into whether its blue tick verification process actually works as intended.
Other more recent moves could possibly kick-start a new power struggle between the European Commission and some of the world’s largest and richest firms.
For example, Meta’s recent announcement to abandon independent fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram and replace them with ‘community notes’ could also potentially breach EU rules.
And another development has seen EU regulators launched an investigation into allegations that Apple had knowingly sourced so-called blood minerals, which are used in its iPhone products, from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
X (formerly Twitter) is also facing investigations into whether its blue tick verification process actually works as intended, with allegations that many of those tick holder accounts are not actually verified
Over the past few years major US tech giants have paid tens of billions of dollars in fines imposed by EU regulators. With Trump on their side now, these firms want to put an end to that.
