America was born in rebellion. Maybe that’s why Europe writing rules for U.S. companies to follow still rubs us the wrong way.
Of course, the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is not the Stamp Act, and Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos are not quite Samuel Adams or Thomas Jefferson. But the complaint is a familiar one: Why should officials Americans neither elect nor control have so much power over the technology we use?
The EU is entitled to govern its own market with the regulations it sees fit. It is not entitled to become America’s self-appointed technology regulator.
If you have never heard of the DMA, you are in good company. Most Americans probably couldn’t tell you much about EU regulations. And who could blame them? Brussels rulemaking makes for a lousy dinner conversation.
The DMA may sound as distant as the places under its governance. Rome, Paris, and Berlin are each thousands of miles from the shores of America, but the DMA’s effects are not.
The DMA is Europe’s rulebook for Big Tech. It covers companies like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, classifying them as “gatekeepers” because of their vast size and reach. Once a company gets that label, Brussels hands it a laundry list of regulations it must follow.
But, as often happens with regulation, it only seems to get larger. Europe’s idea of what counts as a “gatekeeper,” a company supposedly so large and powerful that it needs its own strict set of rules, keeps growing, too. Brussels may soon add cloud giants – which provide much of the digital infrastructure that keeps the internet running, like Amazon Web Services – to the list. That should worry Americans.
EU officials say the DMA’s goal is to give Europeans more choices online, which sounds reasonable enough.
In practice, however, it gives Brussels the power to impose enormous fines against American companies and tell the world’s most popular digital platforms how their products must work.
If it ended at Europe’s borders, it would be Europe’s business. Unfortunately, it does not.
Take Apple, for example. As a consequence of the DMA, Apple was required to make a series of changes to iOS, iPadOS, Safari, and the App Store in Europe. Apple has so far kept many of these changes exclusive to Europe, but separate systems do not build or maintain themselves. They cost companies time and lots of money.
Europeans are already seeing the consequences of DMA expansion. Apple has delayed several features, including iPhone Mirroring, Live Translation with AirPods, and various Maps functions in the EU while it works through the DMA’s restrictions. This means an American and a European can buy essentially the same iPhone, but they will not get the same iPhone experience.
In other words, a rule from Brussels changed the priorities of an American company.
Legal scholar Anu Bradford calls this the “Brussels Effect.” Europe as a marketplace is simply too large for companies to avoid, so they adapt, because walking away would be even more costly in the long run.
Sometimes these changes stay within Europe. But even then, Brussels still has a say in these companies’ business decisions.
Europe certainly lacks America’s concentration of technology giants, but it has learned to make regulation one of its most successful exports.
Apple is far from alone as a target of EU officials.
The European Commission currently recognizes seven gatekeepers. Five are U.S. firms: Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. ByteDance is Chinese, and Booking.com is the lone European company.
With most of the world’s dominant technology platforms based in America, it makes sense that the DMA would impact American companies more heavily. But that does not change the fact that a law advertised as neutral falls overwhelmingly on companies based in one country.
For its part, Brussels has shown it is willing to strictly enforce the DMA. In July, the European Commission fined Google €890 million for “favoring” its own services in Search for shopping, hotel, transportation, and sports.
The basis for this fine was questionable, to say the least. It looks a lot like a European shakedown of American companies. As President Trump noticed in 2024, the EU makes more from fining U.S. tech companies than its entire tax take from the European tech industry.
The bigger question, though, is whether Brussels should have the power to tell an American company what it can and cannot do with its services, while handing down a fine of nearly $1 billion when the company allegedly violates Brussels’ terms.
After EU officials announced the fine, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer accused the EU of targeting American companies and warned such actions could threaten future trade relations between America and Europe.
Washington should make the DMA a key part of its current trade negotiations with Europe. It should also push back against European regulations that unfairly target American companies.
But any fine Europe imposes should reflect what a company did while operating in Europe, not how much money it made worldwide.
Yet the DMA allows Brussels to fine a company up to 10% of its total global revenue, increased to 20% for repeat violations.
None of this means Big Tech should get a free pass. Companies must follow the laws wherever they do business. Ford must follow Japanese safety requirements, and Volkswagen must meet American standards.
Europe has every right to police its own market, but there is a huge difference between setting rules for products sold there and using Europe’s economic clout to set the rules everywhere else.
We do not need to start dumping iPhones into Boston Harbor.
But Americans have never liked distant officials making decisions and writing rules for them that they had no say in.
Brussels answers to Europeans, not to us. Its rules should not become ours simply because American companies cannot afford to ignore the European market.
Brussels may call that the price of doing business in Europe. Americans have another name for it: regulation without representation.