The EU is intensifying its challenge to Google, Meta, Apple and Elon Musk’s X in 2026, in regulatory moves that are expected to lead to renewed clashes with US big tech groups and President Donald Trump.
According to Brussels officials and policymakers, the European Commission is switching focus to enforcing an expansive digital rule book after years of negotiating landmark legislation to take on the world’s biggest technology groups.
That effort will face political challenges over the coming year. The Trump administration has demanded changes to the bloc’s tech rules and threatened to impose tariffs in retaliation for EU actions against Silicon Valley groups.
The EU focus on enforcement comes as Washington’s effort to split up Big Tech groups is faltering after setbacks in several big monopoly cases that cast doubt on the government’s strategy to rein in some of the world’s biggest companies.
RM Block
US federal enforcers have over the past year struggled to convince judges to order tech groups, including Google and Meta, to spin off large parts of their businesses, such as the Chrome browser and the social media platform Instagram.
This drive to break up some of the largest US companies, which began during the first Trump administration and expanded under Joe Biden, marked the biggest challenge in decades to the tech industry’s alleged anticompetitive behaviour.
Prosecutors have won some landmark rulings that tech companies maintained illegal monopolies. But judges have been reluctant to reach for the strictest remedies and carve up businesses or unwind acquisitions, often many years after the fact.
With monopoly cases against Apple and Amazon pending, these decisions have called into question the government’s approach to taming the power of these tech giants.
For its part, the EU faces a difficult balancing act, since it wants to enforce its digital rules without triggering a transatlantic trade war or provoking the US president into siding with Russia on Ukraine.
“There have been moments that we have needed to, where I have needed to, stand up and say: sorry, but we’re not going to undo our regulation just because you don’t like [it],” the EU’s competition chief Teresa Ribera told the Financial Times.
The approach requires sticking with its existing laws, including the Digital Markets Act (DMA), aimed at opening powerful “online gatekeepers” to rivals, and the Digital Services Act (DSA), which forces internet companies to better police illegal content.
Officials working on the implementation of this legislation said the focus had always been behind-the-scenes work to ensure compliance over headline-grabbing sanctions.
After being hit by fines in the spring, both Apple and Meta have made changes to their business models to accommodate the EU’s concerns.
The bloc has begun probing new areas of potential enforcement. In December, Brussels launched an investigation into whether Meta was preventing rival AI providers from accessing WhatsApp, and Google’s use of online content for AI models. Regulators also launched investigations to ensure enough competition in the cloud-computing sector.
“You go ahead in that measured, professional way, and you’re just a little bit more quiet perhaps than you otherwise would be because there’s really no pay-off to making a lot of announcements,” said Fiona Scott Morton, an antitrust scholar at Yale University.
But she added that when it came to enforcing its digital rules, “there is pay-off to moving forward and achieving outcomes that benefit the European people and business users”.
However, some tech cases are likely to draw widespread attention.
The EU’s executive arm will have to decide how much further to push its action against Google over allegedly favouring its own services and products in search results, including whether to issue big fines against the search engine’s parent company, Alphabet.
This year, enforcing the DSA could prove to be even more of a minefield.
The focus so far has been on protecting minors online and the safety of online marketplaces, such as Temu and Shein, and tackling financial fraud online – issues that have agreement on both sides of the Atlantic. That was in part a strategic choice, European officials said, given the geopolitical sensitivities over the DSA.
But in December, the commission fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million over violations to transparency rules under the law, leading to a flurry of anti-European statements from US government officials and calls from Mr Musk to “abolish the EU”.
The same month, the US instituted a visa ban against former EU commissioner Thierry Breton and four other people over what it said was “censorship” and coercion of American social media platforms. Washington said Mr Breton was targeted as the mastermind of the DSA and for telling Mr Musk that X needed to comply with rules on illegal content.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio said it was taking steps to “bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”
Meanwhile, European lawmakers and civil society are pushing Brussels to step up work on more sensitive investigations, such as into X’s attempts to counter the spread of illegal content and TikTok’s potential role in electoral interference.
Lawyers and officials also argue the bloc could go much further to tackle competition in artificial intelligence.
But Damien Geradin, an antitrust lawyer who has represented companies in probes against Google and others, said: “The enforcement of EU digital regulations has been made more challenging by the aggressive stance taken by the US administration.”
Geopolitical considerations have emboldened Big Tech to fight back with a fierce lobbying effort in Europe and the US. Google said the EU’s investigation into its AI models “risks stifling innovation in a market that is more competitive than ever”.
Apple has demanded that Brussels scrap its DMA altogether, while Meta has said the commission tries “to handicap successful American business while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards”.
Caving to internal or external pressure on enforcement would be a “disaster” for the European economy, said Mario Marinello, a fellow at the Brussels-based think-tank Bruegel. “If you want competitiveness, you need strong competition enforcement.”
Even the current enforcement of digital rules was “too little, too late,” said Alexandra Geese, a European lawmaker who sits with the Greens in the European Parliament.
“There is an attack on our democracy going on, led by the tech oligarchs on social media, and we’re not really defending ourselves.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
