European regulators crack down on Big Tech

European regulators have launched a series of probes into Big Tech. In the latest moves, the EU antitrust authority charged Meta and Apple of breaching its Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Microsoft of illegally tying its Office and Teams products.

DMA violations could result in a fine of as much as 10% of a company’s global annual turnover.

Here are some of the actions taken by European watchdogs against big technology companies:

EUROPEAN UNION

The European Commission (EC), which acts as the EU competition enforcer, charged Meta on July 1 for failing to comply with the DMA in its new pay or consent advertising model.

The EC said the binary choice forces users to consent to the combination of their personal data and fails to provide them a less personalised but equivalent version of Meta’s social networks.

In May, Meta had added safety features to its misinformation tracking tool CrowdTangle for use during June’s European Parliament elections in an attempt to allay EU concerns that triggered an investigation in April into the impact of Meta’s decision to phase out the tool.

Facebook and Instagram are also being investigated for potential breaches of EU online content rules relating to child safety, which could lead to hefty fines, the EC said on May 16.

The EC said on June 24 that Apple’s App Store rules breach the DMA by preventing app developers from steering consumers to alternative offers.

The regular said it was opening a new investigation into Apple over its new contractual requirements for third-party app developers and app stores.

Brussels fined Apple 1.84 billion euros ($1.97 billion) on March 4, its first ever EU antitrust penalty, following a 2019 complaint from Spotify. Apple said it would challenge the decision in court.

EU antitrust regulators on June 25 charged Microsoft of illegally bundling its chat and video app Teams with its Office product, and said that more needed to be done to unbundle the package.

Microsoft said it would work to find solutions to address the regulators’ concerns.

The EC is also probing whether Microsoft is preventing customers from relying on certain security software provided by competitors, according to a document regulators sent to at least one of its rivals in January, seen by Reuters.

EU antitrust regulators have also said that Microsoft’s investment of more than $10 billion in ChatGPT maker OpenAI may be subject to EU merger rules.

OpenAI’s efforts to produce less factually false output from its ChatGPT chatbot are not enough to ensure full compliance with EU data rules, a task force at the bloc’s privacy watchdog said in May.

Alphabet’s Google is also being investigated over possible breaches of the DMA, the EC said in March.

An advisor to Europe’s top court said on Jan. 11 the court should uphold Google’s EU antitrust fine of 2.42 billion euros ($2.60 billion). The EC fined the company in 2017 for using its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.

In September 2023, the EU named 22 so-called “gatekeeper” services run by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok-owner ByteDance, giving them six months to comply with the DMA provisions meant to make it easier for European users to move between competing services.

In April, the regulators designated Apple’s operating system for iPads as a gatekeeper under the DMA.

Meta and TikTok appealed against the gatekeeper status in November, with the latter losing a bid to suspend its designation in February. Apple said in April it would continue to engage with the EC to comply with the rules.

BRITAIN

In October, Britain’s media regulator asked the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate Amazon and Microsoft’s dominance of the UK cloud market. The CMA will complete its investigation by April 2025.

FRANCE

Nvidia is set to be charged by the French antitrust regulator for allegedly anti-competitive practices, people with direct knowledge of the matter said on July 1, making it the first enforcer to act against the computer chip maker.

The French so-called statement of objections or charge sheet would follow dawn raids in the graphics cards sector in September last year, which sources said targeted Nvidia.

A group representing more than 700 startups in Spain issued a complaint about Microsoft’s cloud practices to the country’s antitrust regulator in May, citing several allegedly anti-competitive practices in recent years.