Rep. Jim Jordan has asked Teresa Ribera to respond to concerns that fines from Digital Markets Act cases are a ‘European tax on American companies.’
U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has asked EU antitrust boss Teresa Ribera to clarify how she will enforce the European Union’s rules on Big Tech companies.
In October 2024, Spain’s Socialist Workers’ Party politician Teresa Ribera, before being successfully nominated as the European Commission’s antitrust chief, vowed “vigorous enforcement” on large tech companies using the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
“We write to express our concerns that the DMA may target American companies,” Jordan wrote in a letter sent to Ribera on Sunday.
The letter also criticized fines of up to 10 percent of global annual revenues for DMA violations.
“These severe fines appear to have two goals: to compel businesses to follow European standards worldwide, and as a European tax on American companies,” Jordan said.
“These, along with other provisions of the DMA, stifle innovation, disincentivize research and development, and hand vast amounts of highly valuable proprietary data to companies and adversarial nations.”
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The letter urged Ribera—whose official role is executive vice-president for a clean, just, and competitive transition and who is the EU’s second most powerful official after its president, Ursula von der Leyen—to brief the judiciary committee by March 10.
Gatekeepers
In 2023, the EU designated Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and TikTok owner ByteDance as “gatekeepers“ under the DMA, meaning that because of their size, they warrant extra regulation.
Last year, the European Commission opened investigations into Alphabet, Apple, and Meta for potentially breaching the DMA, legislation that imposes antitrust obligations.
At the time, former European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager said, “We are concerned Alphabet, Apple, and Meta are not meeting their obligations; e.g., Apple and Alphabet still charge recurring fees to app developers [and] Meta offers no real choice for users to opt out of data combination.”
In November 2024, Google offered to tweak its search results in Europe, after several smaller rivals complained about getting lower traffic to their search engines.
The world’s most popular internet search engine previously tried to address conflicting demands from price-comparison sites, hotels, airlines, and small retailers.
However, three industry groups said the number of people clicking on their direct bookings had fallen by 30 percent since Google made the changes.
If found in violation of the DMA, Google could be fined as much as 10 percent of its annual global turnover.
In January, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told The Joe Rogan podcast that the EU had forced U.S. tech companies operating in Europe to pay “more than $30 billion” in penalties for legal violations over the past 10 or 20 years.
He said he believed that the European Commission’s application of competition rules is “almost like a tariff” on U.S. tech companies.
The Financial Times reported on Jan. 14, using anonymous sources, that the European Commission was reassessing its investigations of Big Tech.
However, commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said at the EU’s executive’s daily briefing on Jan. 14 that it has “upcoming meetings to assess maturity of cases, to assess the allocation of resources and the general readiness of the investigation.”
Trump Memo
President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Feb 21 telling his administration to identify which foreign governments are imposing taxes, fines, and regulations on U.S. companies doing business abroad and to prepare for responsive tariffs.
Among the fines and fees that Trump’s memorandum looks to address are digital services taxes.
“Regulations that dictate how American companies interact with consumers in the European Union, like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, will face scrutiny from the Administration,” the White House said.
An EU Commission spokesman told The Epoch Times by email that it had received the letter and will reply in due course.
“The Digital Markets Act applies equally to all large digital actors operating in the EU single market, irrespective of their place of incorporation or of their controlling shareholders, to ensure a safe, fair and level-playing field in the EU,” he said.
He said the EU has “always applied and will continue to apply our laws in a fair and non-discriminatory way to all companies that operate in the EU, and always remain subject to independent judicial scrutiny.”
Reuters, Ryan Morgan, and Chris Summers contributed to this report.
