Inside Big Tech's EU lobbying efforts ahead of new rules: Google had the most meetings, CEOs led lobbying, and focus shifted from hate speech to antitrust rules
Big Tech pivoted away from content moderation rules to #antitrust proposals in the summer b/c Digital Markets Act represented a greater near-term threat Laura Kayali / @laukaya : Take-aways from 2 years of lobbying on the Commission's rulebook for platforms. With @markscott82 — The fight changed focus halfway from the Digital Services Act to the Digital Markets Act — Big Tech divided on the DMA — The rise of the CEO-lobbyist https://www.politico.eu/... Mark Scott / @markscott82 : In frenzied WhatsApp chats, lengthy Zoom calls and (pre-covid lockdown) in-person meetings, tech execs have vied for influence w/ civil society groups & traditional European industrial giants Mark Scott / @markscott82 : — Access is king: EU officials took 160 meetings on digital reboot plans, & @Google topped the table w/ the most meetings. — In COVID-19 era, contacts are key, & smaller players w/ less access lost out Mark Scott / @markscott82 : Europe is about to unveil a major overhaul of its digital rulebook — and Silicon Valley has pulled out all the stops in its lobbying efforts. Here's how that fight has gone w/ @LauKaya https://www.politico.eu/... Mark Scott / @markscott82 : Digital policy announcements are like city buses. You wait around forever, and then two show up at once: Also coming tomorrow, UK's “Online Harms” proposals to force duty of care onto social media companies to protect their users from “harmful content”
Context & Ripple Effects
This Politico retrospective on two years of lobbying around the Commission's digital rulebook is the opening chapter of a story that kept unfolding: the pivot from content-moderation rules to the DMA antitrust fight, which US firms ultimately failed to shape and moved into compliance mode. The access gap the piece documents — 160 Commission meetings dominated by Google, CEOs personally leading pitches while smaller firms were locked out during COVID — set the template for what followed.
First-order effects
- Google's meeting advantage gave it the loudest voice in the Digital Markets Act debate even as Big Tech stayed divided on the proposal, weakening any unified counter-position against the Commission.
- The shift of lobbying resources from the Digital Services Act to the DMA signaled to Brussels that gatekeepers saw structural antitrust obligations, not hate-speech rules, as the near-term threat to their business models.
Second-order effects
- The Commission's awareness of this access imbalance fed into institutional responses like the planned San Francisco office to engage Silicon Valley directly rather than relying on Brussels-based meetings.
- Lobbying intensity only escalated afterward — spend climbing from €97M in 2021 to €151M by 2025 — as last-minute pushes on surveillance advertising showed firms treating rulemaking as a permanent campaign rather than a one-off negotiation.
Third-order effects
- CEO-level personal lobbying became standard practice for market-access questions in Europe, entrenching an asymmetry where large incumbents buy access and smaller firms compete through coalitions with civil society and industrial allies instead.
- With the US and EU pursuing dueling regulatory approaches, Big Tech's compliance apparatus now splits between two legal regimes, making the Brussels lobbying playbook built during the DMA fight a durable cost of doing business in Europe.
The trend: EU digital rulemaking has turned lobbying into a standing, CEO-led function for Big Tech, with access concentration shaping who influences gatekeeper regulation as enforcement replaces drafting.