The European Commission Is Assaulting American Tech Companies
Meta, Apple, Microsoft, and others have all faced legal action from the European Union in recent years.
The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union (E.U.), defines its role in international relations as designing development policy and delivering national aid. The commission should also acknowledge the role it plays in antagonizing American corporations on the world stage.
The commission's Directorate General for Competition is charged with evaluating mergers, prohibiting collusion, and monitoring for abuses of dominant market position. Such abuses, in the commission's eye, include "imposing unfair purchase or selling prices….limiting production, markets or technical development….and applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions." On this last basis alone, the commission brought at least five major lawsuits against American firms during President Joe Biden's administration.
Meta was fined more than $817 million for tying Facebook and Facebook Marketplace this November. In March, Apple was fined about $1.84 billion for preventing music streaming app developers from informing iPhone users about cheaper streaming services on the App Store. (Spotify—not Apple Music—made up 56 percent of Europe's music streaming market.) Intel was fined $384 million for conditional rebates and naked restrictions pertaining to the sale of computers featuring x86 CPUs in September 2023.
In July 2024, Apple was compelled to share its mobile wallet technology with competitors under a penalty of 5 percent of its daily revenue for each day of noncompliance. Amazon was threatened with a fine of up to 10 percent of the company's annual revenue for using nonpublic data for its retail business two years earlier. The E.U. General Court only recently overturned a $1.53 billion fine imposed by the commission on Google on the allegation the company had anticompetitively favored its own ad exchange.
This noncomprehensive list excludes active investigations against American firms such as the one against Microsoft for tying Teams and Office 365. Also excluded are those lawsuits against American tech firms on General Data Protection Regulation grounds, such as the $324 million fine Uber suffered in August for allegedly transferring personal data about European drivers to the U.S. without sufficient protection.
Expropriating billions of dollars from American businesses is injurious and capricious. Citizens of the E.U. benefit from the American technology sector; siphoning capital from U.S. tech firms leaves them with less to commit to research and development, stymieing further innovation. The E.U. should stop penalizing American firms that outcompete their European counterparts.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "The European Commission Is Assaulting American Industry."
