Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The EU has fined Apple and Facebook owner Meta a total of €700mn for breaching antitrust rules but held back from potentially bigger penalties as Brussels seeks to avoid escalating tensions with US President Donald Trump.
On Wednesday, regulators fined the iPhone maker €500mn and ordered it to revise its App Store rules within two months following an investigation into whether Apple’s rules prevented app developers from sending consumers to offers outside its platform.
The EU also imposed a fine of €200mn on Meta and said the tech group must change its “pay or consent” model, which forces users to either consent to data tracking or pay a subscription fee for an ad-free experience.
Under the Digital Markets Act, companies can face penalties of up to 10 per cent of their global turnover, which could have added up to billions of euros for both companies.
But Brussels has opted for fines that fall far below that threshold as it attempts to enforce the DMA, which was designed to curb tech giants’ dominance of the digital marketplace, while avoiding a direct clash with Washington.
The new European Commission, which took office in December, is also more focused on the compliance of tech companies with the law than on potential high fines, according to officials.
“This is a very new regulation,” Teresa Ribera, the EU’s competition chief told the Financial Times to explain the size of the fines. “We are very conscious that these are the very first decisions.”
The new fines follow a 90-day pause of Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariff scheme, as the US president seeks to find a deal with the EU amid escalating tensions.
This month, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen warned that it could hit US services exports, including Big Tech’s operations in Europe, in retaliation for US tariffs.
The EU’s rules on Big Tech are a big flashpoint between Brussels and Trump, who has previously compared the EU’s fines with “overseas extortion” and called them a “form of taxation”.
On Wednesday, the commission also announced it was closing two other investigations into Apple and Meta without any further sanctions.
But Brussels said it would look more closely into Apple’s contract terms, which could result in fines at a later stage of the process. In preliminary findings, the commission found that Apple does not allow third-party app stores on its iOS operating system or for apps to be downloaded to iPhones directly from the web.
Apple said it would appeal and called the announcements “yet another example of the European Commission unfairly targeting Apple in a series of decisions that are bad for the privacy and security of our users, bad for products and force us to give away our technology for free”.
Meta said the commission was attempting to “handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards”.
“The commission forcing us to change our business model effectively imposes a multibillion-dollar tariff on Meta while requiring us to offer an inferior service,” said Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief lobbyist.
While the fines imposed on Meta and Google are minimal, officials said there is still nervousness about how Trump will react.
In two months, the commission will have to decide again whether the companies have done enough to comply with the law, or whether to impose periodic penalties on them.
