EU’s Big Tech softball may yet become hardball

There are two ways to look at Ursula von der Leyen’s relatively softball fines for U.S. Big Tech. One is that Wednesday’s 500 million euro and 200 million euro hit for Apple and Meta Platforms respectively means that the European Commission president has buckled amid pressure from her opposite number, Donald Trump. The other is that the penalties for anti-competitive behaviour aren’t hugely different to what the European Union would have meted out anyway, and don’t necessarily reflect how aggressively it will target the sector in future. On balance, the latter interpretation is more plausible.Read More