How the EU should stand up to Trump's Tech Bros oligarchy

Former EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager used to laugh at how US lawmakers on Capitol Hill sneered at her when she first targeted American tech companies for breaking EU competition rules in the pre-Trump era. 

As a returning Donald Trump takes aim at EU regulators, promising Apple CEO Tim Cook not to “let them take advantage of our companies,” no laughter is to be heard in the Berlaymont.

Worse still, commission president Ursula von der Leyen seems to be considering tearing up the Union’s brand-new digital competition rules as a way of staving off even worse from Trump — from a full-blown trade war to US abandonment of Nato. 

According to the Financial Times, the European Commission is reconsidering ongoing probes into anti-competitive practices by Meta, Apple and Google. But the EU executive has denied these claims. The investigations were launched under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a flagship EU legislative initiative seeking to stop large tech companies from abusing their market dominance, which came into force only last year. 

The EU's new tech and competition commissioners, Henna Virkkunen and Teresa Ribera, have tried tocalm jangled nerves has tried to calm jangled nerves by insisting that the investigations are proceeding as planned.

But the EU’s collective silence on Big Tech’s increasingly brazen interference in Europe’s sovereign affairs – from Elon Musk’s aggressive promotion of the German far-right on X to Mark Zuckerberg urging Trump to protect Meta from European “censorship” – speaks volumes.  

Trump re-enters the White House having promised to impose across-the-board tariffs on EU goods and services unless the bloc ramps up its purchases of American fossil fuels. The US is by far the EU’s largest export market and new trade barriers would damage the bloc's already reeling economy. 

Dropping, pausing or slow walking investigations of American tech giants under the DMA, competition law or other EU regulations would be one way of currying favor with the incoming Trump administration.

But as French liberal MEP Stéphanie Yon-Courtin, one of the European Parliament’s lead negotiators on the DMA, rightly argued in a recent letter to von der Leyen, caving to US political pressure on tech oversight would set a “dangerous precedent” that “undermines the legitimacy of our regulatory framework” and emboldens further attacks on EU rules. 

Big Tech 'broligarchy'

As Big Tech becomes increasingly intertwined with the Trump administration, the last thing the EU should do is water down enforcement in the vain hopes of placating Trump and his tech “broligarchy.” Instead, the EU should be doubling down on its digital rulebook. 

Musk’s disruptive forays into European politics and Zuckerberg’s craven submission to the MAGA movement (with Google, Amazon and Microsoft not far behind) illustrate the growing political threat posed by Europe’s dependence on US tech giants. Tackling their market dominance is now an urgent matter of national security and sovereignty, not just economics. 

But it is also good economics. Without creating space for European innovators to thrive by reining in today’s dominant tech monopolies using tools like the DMA, Europe has little chance of building a robust homegrown tech sector able to capitalise on the promise of AI. Failure here means falling further behind in digital, deepening Europe’s economic woes and magnifying its technological dependencies.

More fundamentally, the law is the law, and the EU can’t just abandon it when faced with political headwinds. Caving here would almost certainly be viewed by Trump, shrewd negotiator that he is, as a sign of weakness. The threats would only be greater next time, as would the required concessions. 

Under Joe Biden’s presidency, US antitrust enforcers worked in close harmony with their European counterparts based on a shared understanding of the Big Tech threat.

While more could — and should — have been achieved, those days are unfortunately likely behind us. 

Visionary officials like Federal Trade commissioner Lina Kahn and Department of Justice antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter are on their way out. In comes a cohort of Trump nominees who – while not necessarily friends of Big Tech – may struggle to overcome Silicon Valley’s accelerating influence over the White House.   

The stage is now set for Europe to take the lead. Sacrificing Europe’s digital sovereignty as an offering to Trump would be a huge gamble, and one unlikely to pay off. The continent would become a digital vassal state, subject to the algorithmic whims of its foreign tech masters. To avoid this dark future, Europe needs to turbocharge its efforts to build a democratic digital economy that puts the public interest, not corporate profits, first. The stakes could not be higher.