The European Union will keep up with its investigations on US big tech firms even in the face of the beginning of the new Trump administration, but rumours persist of an easing of the investigations.
President-elect Donald Trump and his advisor and X owner Elon Musk have both been vocally critical of the EU and its regulatory policies, especially on tech companies. Last week, Facebook founder and owner Mark Zuckerberg spoke with Trump specifically to ask his help in stopping EU fines on his companies.
US tech companies specifically have been very critical of the three main pieces of EU legislations that try to regulate their sector, namely the Digital Markets Act (DMA) for its antitrust regulation, the Digital Services Act (DSA) for its imposition on content moderation and the EU AI Act. They all believe that the regulations block innovation.
According to the Financial Times, the EU is scaling back its ongoing investigations as Trump takes office and the bloc is yet to see how his administration is going to approach these topics. Another source from Reuters said that enforcement of law has been stalled until Trump takes office. However, the Commission rejected these claims, saying through a spokesperson that “what we do have is upcoming meetings to assess maturity of cases, to assess the allocation of resources and the general readiness of the investigation.”
Currently the various investigations on Apple, Alphabet, Meta and X are all in early stages, way before any decision is to be taken or made public, according to a Commission’s spokesperson. The Commission usually takes years to finish its investigations so it is too early to tell whether or not there has been a change of attitude in Brussels on the issue.
Moreover, the new Commission is taking the rein, and the relevant commissioner is changing, with Henna Virkkunen taking up the role of Executive Vice-President for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy where will follow up on the relevant roles of Thierry Breton and Margrethe Vestager.
