Doc: the US is pressing EU officials to revise the Digital Markets Act to focus less on US tech giants and ensure it covers tech companies from outside the US
Context & Ripple Effects
The US push to reshape the Digital Markets Act marks a sharp reversal from 2021, when a draft memo showed Washington and Brussels planning to work together on Big Tech regulation on hate speech and algorithmic amplification. Now, months before EU lawmakers passed the DMA, the US position is that the law's gatekeeper design unfairly concentrates its burden on American firms.
The argument Washington is making — that the DMA should cover tech companies from outside the US — anticipates the fight that follows: [[a:847498|bipartisan US lawmakers later warned Biden that EU rules were targeting American companies while sparing many Chinese and EU ones]], and the US and EU's dueling regulatory approaches went on to split tech companies' attention across separate legal battles.
First-order effects
- US tech giants designated as DMA gatekeepers gain a formal diplomatic channel to argue for broader coverage that would dilute their relative compliance burden under the law the EU passed in July 2022.
- EU officials drafting the DMA's final shape face pressure to widen the gatekeeper criteria to non-US firms, a change that would alter which companies fall under the regime's obligations.
Second-order effects
- If the EU broadened DMA coverage, Chinese and EU platforms would inherit compliance costs that currently concentrate on US firms, changing the law's competitive incidence rather than its intensity.
- The dispute pushes regulation into transatlantic diplomacy: the same companies end up navigating both US and EU enforcement tracks, and each side's rules become leverage in the other's negotiations.
Third-order effects
- The episode foreshadows the EU's later pivot from regulating US platforms toward drafting tech sovereignty legislation that openly discusses security risks from US tech — suggesting the scope dispute is a symptom of a deeper alignment question.
- Even as the EU's draft International Digital Strategy conceded that decoupling from US tech is unrealistic, the pattern points toward jurisdictional breadth becoming the standing bargaining chip in US-EU tech regulation, with platform rules doubling as industrial policy.
The trend: Transatlantic tech regulation is shifting from coordinated rulemaking toward contested jurisdictional scope, with which companies a law covers becoming the central US-EU bargaining point.