Strategic Intelligence: Antitrust

Strategic Intelligence: Antitrust

Summary

Consensus around the need to regulate digital monopolies has never been stronger on both sides of the Atlantic. The European Commission is enforcing the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and is expected to wrap up its investigations of Google, Meta, and Apple by 2026.

The US government has stepped up efforts to tackle digital monopolies through lawsuits. The Department of Justice is considering breaking up Google, which would represent the strongest intervention to date against one of the world’s most powerful tech companies. However, no company has yet been sanctioned for a DMA infringement, while all lawsuits opened against Big Tech in the US are ongoing.

Key Highlights

• Under the second Trump administration, transatlantic tensions over digital regulation, including antitrust, will heighten. President Trump views the DMA as “overseas extortion” of US companies, but Brussels is determined to go ahead with its antitrust investigations and has said that it will make no concessions on its digital rules in trade negotiations with the US. There will likely be an acceleration in DMA enforcement as the EU uses the threat of fines and sanctions as bargain chips in tariff negotiations with Washington. The result could be a damaging tit-for-tat trade war in the tech industry.
• While the Trump administration is expected to be more friendly to consolidation across different sectors, the tech industry will likely be the exception, as both recently appointed heads of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DoJ) have signaled their interest in scrutinizing Big Tech over antitrust. However, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and partnerships perceived to be in the national interest, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI), will likely receive a green light from US regulators.

• This report looks at how antitrust is impacting the tech, media, and telecom (TMT) industry globally.
• It identifies the companies that will be impacted by antitrust regulation, as well as the main trends shaping the antitrust theme.
• It includes an overview of the global regulatory landscape and a timeline showing the major milestones in this theme.

• Existing competition laws were not conceived for the digital era, particularly when defining significant market power and anticompetitive practices.
• They have struggled to adapt to the challenges of the digital economy, where tech giants thrive thanks to their extensive, established customer networks and low-cost capital.
• They have also failed to grasp the complexity of digital platforms, which typically connect many sides of a market (for example, consumers, advertisers, developers, and publishers in the digital advertising market). In single-sided markets, the consumer feels the burden of monopoly through higher prices, but this is not easy to establish in multi-sided markets.
• Across the world, governments are rethinking antitrust rules that will determine the future of the internet and our data.