There are many differences between European and American antitrust regulation, but recent enforcement against Big Tech shows that in the most important ways they are converging on an anti-monopoly philosophy, writes Paul Friederiszick.
Antitrust enforcement on both sides of the Atlantic has converged to discipline Big Tech’s digital power. In April, the European Union issued relatively modest fines and behavioral remedies under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) against Apple and Meta for anticompetitive behavior. That same month, the United States Federal Trade Commission began its trial to break up Meta’s alleged monopoly in personal social media. The U.S.’ analogue action against Apple came last year, when the U.S. Department of Justice sued Apple for monopolizing the smartphone market. There has also been private litigation in the U.S. against Apple that targeted the same behaviors which the EU’s recent fines addressed.
Although the two jurisdictions have employed different tools to discipline Big Tech, their intentions and philosophy are the same. The actions suggest that though the EU and U.S. talk about antitrust and competition in different ways, there are many more similarities than differences, contrary to those who argue that the respective political traditions of the EU and US are fundamentally incompatible. A rose is a rose by any other name, and in this case that name is anti-monopoly.
Comparative overview of cases: Apple
On April 23, the EU Commission issued its first fines under the DMA, penalizing Apple 500 million euros and Meta 200 million. The EU Commission established that Apple had breached its anti-steering obligation under Article 5 (4) of the DMA by preventing app developers who distributed their apps via Apple’s App Store from informing customers of alternative, cheaper offers outside the App Store.
This closely mirrors the private litigation case Epic Games v. Apple in the U.S., in which game developer Epic Games challenged Apple’s anti-steering provisions that force users to make in-app purchases through Apple (and for which Apple receives a large cut). In September 2021, a federal judge found Apple’s rules violated California’s Unfair Competition Law. In January 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case, leaving the lower court’s injunction intact. And on April 30, 2025, a federal judge ruled that Apple had failed to comply with the injunction.
This private litigation under California competition law is substantially similar to the DMA case and has resulted in very similar remedies. Neither the EU nor U.S. cases relied on proving market dominance (not required under the California Unfair Competition Law or the DMA’s gatekeeper designation).
Meanwhile, the pending DOJ’s case against Apple for monopolizing the smartphone market under Section 2 of the Sherman Act takes up implicitly the conglomerate theory. The theory, which originated in 1960’s U.S. merger control, holds in its narrowest definition that firms owned by the same conglomerate that do not compete directly or operate along the same supply chain may still raise competitive concerns when they offer complementary, non-competing products to the same set of customers. In simpler terms, conglomerate theory argues that anticompetitive effects emerge across different relevant product markets (antitrust markets) as defined by antitrust law and economics.
U.S. Department of Justice v. Apple, one of the most significant antitrust actions since United States v. Microsoft in the late 1990s, faces challenges in proving monopolization and establishing anticompetitive cross-market relationships such as payments and app distribution. A prime example, consistent with conglomerate theory, is Apple’s restriction of access to near field communication (NFC) functionality on the iPhone, which prevents competing mobile wallets from operating and channels users exclusively through Apple Pay—two complementary but distinct products offered to the same user base. In fact, the conglomerate theory’s analysis of how a conglomerate’s divisions and subsidies in nominally different markets support and reinforce one another’s operations is very similar to the ecosystem analysis of harms, newly popular in the EU.
There remain doctrinal differences between the conglomerate and ecosystem theories of harm. Most notably, conglomerate analysis relies on traditional market definition for understanding how conglomerates leverage market power across a few adjacent markets. Meanwhile, ecosystem theory often dispenses with rigid market boundaries and instead focuses on core platform services, which serve as starting points for various anticompetitive practices across multidimensional, more loosely interlinked markets.
For example, under ecosystem theory, Apple’s operating system (iOS), which runs the iPhone, functions as a central control point, through which Apple allegedly orchestrates restrictions across payments, browsers, app distribution, and developer access to maintain dominance over its wider digital environment or ecosystem. And yet their explication of how multi-market conglomerates can leverage their footholds to engage in cross-market exclusionary conduct is very similar.
Nearly every anticompetitive practice challenged in U.S. Department of Justice v. Apple has a corresponding obligation in the DMA. The U.S. complaint describes how Apple blocks rival digital wallets from accessing core iPhone features, while the DMA’s Article 5 (7) explicitly requires Apple to grant third-party wallets such access.
The U.S. complaint also explains Apple’s restrictions on web apps that prevent them from fully engaging with browsers. Web apps can be seen as the infrastructure for super apps, which are created using standard programming languages for web-based services and are available via the internet. Super apps allow developers to host or connect other apps and services without having to rely on the iPhone’s operating system (so called Application Programming Interfaces or “APIs”). They have the potential to allow users to circumvent the Apple App Store altogether, which Epic Games v. Apple shows Apple is reluctant to allow, given how much it accrues from transaction fees. This alleged anticompetitive practice is best mirrored by Article 6 (3) DMA, which prohibits forcing developers to use Apple’s WebKit engine (Apple’s browser), since it may block web apps to create super apps to bypass Apple’s App store.
In addition, the U.S. complaint details Apple’s refusal to allow alternative app stores on iOS. The DMA’s Article 6 (4) mandates enabling third-party app stores. The DOJ highlights Apple blocking API access for rival hardware and software. The DMA’s Article 6 (7) obliges Apple to provide such access on fair terms.
Comparative overview of cases: Meta
Simultaneous to fining Apple, the EU Commission established that Meta’s “consent or pay model,” introduced in 2023, violates the gatekeeper obligations under the DMA. Facebook and Instagram had given EU users a choice between consenting to giving Meta access to personal data for personalized advertising or paying a monthly subscription for an ad-free service. The EU’s 2018 General Data Protection Regulation prevents companies from collecting personal data from users without their permission, unlike in the U.S., where users do not have this opt-in choice. The EU found Meta’s policy violated the sovereignty of users’ data rights by giving them a false choice.
Similarly, the FTC’s complaint against Meta, whose trial just ended, seeks to unwind Meta’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp from a decade ago by applying Section 2 of the Sherman Act (the equivalent to Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union). The FTC contends that the acquisitions, both of which it had initially cleared, amounted to an illegal monopolization of the market for personal social media. This case is legally comparable to the DMA’s approach, as the FTC’s goal of separating WhatsApp and Instagram from Meta mirrors the European DMA’s concerns about data sharing between Facebook and Instagram without users’ free consent under Article 5 (2) DMA. Both actions aim to dismantle the anticompetitive effects of ecosystem integration: the FTC through structural separation and the DMA through behavioral obligations limiting the combination of personal data across Meta’s social networks.
It’s all anti-monopoly
The shared experiences of regulating Apple and Meta are only two ways in which EU and U.S. competition policies have converged. Google is another prominent example. The DOJ’s structural remedy proposals against Google in the Google Search case, including the potential divestiture of the Chrome browser, rest on a finding of market dominance under U.S. antitrust law. While the DMA’s gatekeeper designation under Article 3 is not a dominance assessment in the classical sense—it is based on quantitative turnover and user metrics rather than market share analysis—it nevertheless targets firms that, in practice, hold substantial market power. Both jurisdictions would agree that Google’s position qualifies as “super dominance,” a fact underscored by the EU Commission’s explicit dominance finding under Article 102 TFEU in the Google Shopping case.
What enforcement of Apple, Meta, and other Big Tech companies reveal is that, despite structural differences in their legal frameworks, both the EU and U.S. systems show a striking substantive and philosophical convergence. The U.S. government takes an ex-post path to antitrust enforcement, which treats anticompetitive harms as they arise. The EU takes an ex-ante approach, which establishes guidelines to prevent their emergence in the first place. But both approaches address the same competitive harms. And though many of the DMA’s obligations are ex-ante, their real intent is to unwind the market power of Big Tech ex-post, i.e., after such power has already arisen. In addition, the DMA includes an obligation requiring all designated gatekeepers to notify the EU Commission of any proposed acquisitions, aiming to prevent ex-ante the kind of outcome the U.S. FTC is now seeking ex-post by attempting to separate WhatsApp and Instagram from Meta. A similar pattern may arise in the U.S. DOJ’s lawsuit against Apple.
Both regulatory systems are increasingly inspired by a common underlying philosophical approach: anti-monopoly in digital markets. The distinction between the U.S. case-by-case ex post scrutiny and the European DMA approach with faster ex-ante obligations seems superficial compared to the fundamental interests and goals in the above discussed cases. The transatlantic shift is not simply about regulating Big Tech’s conduct but confronting systematic cross-market power. Both the DMA and U.S. antitrust enforcement priorities now reflect the view that digital platform dominance is not a static single market outcome, but a product of multiple across market practices embedded in a digital neo-conglomerate structure (“ecosystem”), which requires proactive, structural governance.
That being said, differences in enforcement styles still matter. The DMA’s emphasis on fines and behavioral remedies and the U.S.’ pursuit of structural remedies such as break-ups will impact how competition and markets evolve. These differences will produce enforcement gaps, where anticompetitive behaviors can survive in one jurisdiction even as they are quashed in another.
As such, U.S. courts and regulators and the EU Commission will need to monitor each other’s enforcement closely. As the DMA will result in much faster enforcement than the U.S. monopolization cases, and in the process surface the known obstacles of proving monopolization and cross-market harms, the U.S. will be able to benefit from how the EU remedies play out in practice. As many of the Big Tech companies are American, structural remedies in the U.S. cases will produce ripple effects that will require flexible responses from the EU.
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