The European Commission is reassessing investigations of tech giants, such as Apple, Meta, and Google, as these companies urge President-elect Donald Trump to intervene against the “overzealous EU enforcement,” The Information reports.
According to the publication, the European Commission will review some of its decisions, which could scale back or change the remit of probes, made since March 2024, when the EU’s Digital Markets Act took effect.
“It’s going to be a whole new ballgame with these tech oligarchs so close to Trump and using that to pressurize us,” said a senior EU diplomat briefed on the review to The Information. “So much is up in the air right now.”
That said, some of the largest fines against Apple, Meta, and Google could lower their value with weaker penalties. The publication heard from two EU officials that regulators are now “waiting for political direction to take final decisions on the Google, Apple, and Meta cases.”
While Apple and Google have been complying with the latest DMA requirements, it’s possible that this might change in the near future. For example, Apple considered some of the European Commission requests out of touch, such as making AirDrop available to third-party developers, as the company believes this could risk its privacy-first approach.
Still, with the European Commission reviewing its requests and penalties, this could make American tech giants change their policies and products more slowly.
In Meta’s case, its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, called on the President-elect to stop the EU from fining US tech companies. He said last week: “We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.”
BGR will keep following the developments of the Trump presidency and how it might affect the European Commission’s relationship with American tech giants.
