The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, defines its role in international relations as shaping development policy and providing assistance to national governments. The commission should also acknowledge the role it plays in antagonizing US corporations on the world stage.
The Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition is responsible for assessing mergers, prohibiting collusion and monitoring abuses of dominant market positions. Such abuses, in the Commission’s eyes, include “imposing unfair purchase or selling prices, limiting production, markets or technical development, and applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions.” On this last ground alone, the Commission has brought at least five major lawsuits against US companies during the administration of President Joe Biden.
Meta was fined more than $817 million in November 2024 for bundling Facebook and its Facebook Marketplace. 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, accounts for 56 percent of the European music streaming market.) Intel was fined $384 million for conditional rebates and restrictions related to the sale of computers with x86 CPUs in September 2023.
In July 2024, Apple was forced to share its mobile wallet technology with competitors, with a fine of 5 percent of its daily revenue for each day of non-compliance. Amazon faced a fine of up to 10 percent of the company’s annual revenue for using non-public data for its retail business two years earlier. The EU’s General Court recently overturned a $1.53 billion fine that the Commission imposed on Google for “anti-competitively favoring” its own ad exchange.
This non-exhaustive list excludes active investigations against US companies, such as the one against Microsoft for bundling Teams and Office 365. It also excludes those lawsuits against US tech companies under the General Data Protection Regulation, such as the $324 million fine Uber suffered in August 2024 for allegedly transferring personal data of European drivers to the US without sufficient protection.
The expropriation of billions of dollars from US companies is harmful and capricious. EU citizens benefit from the US tech sector; the capital drain from US tech companies leaves them with less money for research and development, preventing further innovation. The EU should stop penalizing US companies that outperform their European counterparts.
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