Meta may have warned that it will run to President Donald Trump if the European Union is mean to it, but it doesn’t look like the EU’s leadership is backing off.
In an interview with Reuters published Tuesday, antitrust commissioner Teresa Ribera said her team would issue major decisions about Meta and Apple next month, as planned. The Spaniard said the decisions would be “along the lines that have been discussed with the companies, developed and based on evidence.”
So much for speculation that the Commission might hold off on concluding the Apple and Meta cases, because of pressure from the Trump administration.
In both cases, the Commission last year issued preliminary findings that the companies have violated the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a blockbuster piece of Big Tech competition legislation that came into effect last March. Meta’s case is about its attempt to charge Facebook and Instagram users fees for avoiding targeted advertising, while Apple stands accused of illegally making developers dependent on its App Store.
Fines under the DMA can run as high as 10% of global annual revenues, or even twice that amount for repeated violations. Neither Meta nor Apple had responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
‘Same rules for everybody’
The question of European enforcement against U.S. companies has become particularly sensitive since the advent of the second Trump administration, as the returned president is also in the process of launching or threatening tariff-based trade wars.
EU trade chief Maroš Šefčovič, who is visiting Washington this week, said last week that the Commission would discuss “anything” to ward off a potential trade war with the U.S.
But Ribera told Reuters that this wouldn’t include changing Europe’s laws. “We need to be flexible, but we cannot transact on human rights, nor are we going to transact on the unity of Europe, and we are not going to transact on democracy and values,” she said.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year claimed that EU regulatory fines were “almost like a tariff” on U.S. companies like his, and he expected President Trump to have Meta’s back.
The company’s new policy chief, Joel Kaplan, drove that point home Sunday at the Munich Security Conference, saying: “When companies are treated differently in a way that is discriminatory against them, then that should be highlighted to that company’s home government. So I think we will do that with President Trump.”
U.S. Vice President JD Vance last week took aim at EU tech regulation during his explosive speech at the Munich Security Conference, complaining of “old entrenched interests.“ But the Commission denies that its digital rules discriminate against U.S. firms.
“When we are doing business in other countries we have to respect their rules,” tech commissioner Henna Virkkunen told Politico last week. “When it comes to our digital rules in the European Union they are very fair, they are the same rules for everybody, for American companies, for European … for China’s companies.”
American tech companies are indeed disproportionately affected by enforcement under the DMA and a similarly new law called the Digital Services Act (DSA), which covers illegal online content. But that is most likely because U.S. Big Tech dominates the European market. The Commission has also opened formal DSA proceedings against Chinese companies like TikTok and AliExpress, which also have a major presence in the region.
Mixed signals
Given the way in which tech regulation has become central to the U.S.-EU trade confrontation, many have been closely watching for signs of whether or not the Commission might bend on enforcement. And so far, those signs have been mixed.
Last week, the Commission withdrew a proposed directive covering civil liability for the harms caused by AI systems, and Virkkunen also told the Financial Times that it would ease off on some of the tougher reporting requirements under an upcoming code of practice for the providers of general-purpose AI.
However, Virkkunen cast this deregulatory push as a result of Europe’s own desire to cut red tape, rather than bowing to U.S. pressure. The new Commission, which took form at the end of last year following European elections, has been trying to ease rules in response to a report from former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who said bureaucracy and excessive antitrust enforcement (for European companies) was harming Europe’s competitiveness.
The second draft of the AI code of practice, which the Commission’s AI Office issued shortly before Christmas, did go substantially beyond the wording of the AI Act that it aims to enforce; for example, it said that companies have to be able to detail how many of an AI model’s parameters are being activated when the model is generating answers, and even that that AI firms should make “reasonable efforts to assess the copyright compliance of third-party datasets” that they use when training their models.
That draft sparked heavy criticism from U.S. AI giants like Google and Meta, but also from local European AI companies, who said it could stymie AI development on the continent.
The AI Office was supposed to issue a third draft of the code this week, but on Monday it informed the sector of a delay. “Due to the importance of the third draft, the chairs [of the office] have requested additional time to ensure that the published version best reflects the comprehensive feedback received from diverse stakeholder categories and is legally robust,” it said in a message seen by Fortune.
“We are optimistic that this is a sign that the [Commission] is taking its commitments to better support innovation seriously and an indication of a change of mindset on the part of the AI Office and the drafting committee,” said Tomasz Snażyk, CEO of the Poland-based industry group AI Chamber.
The Commission has not yet responded to questions about when the third draft will appear, and whether the delay has anything to do with the Commission’s newfound desire to avoid imposing new obligations on tech companies.
