The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union (E.U.), defines its role in international relations as designing development policy and delivering national aid. The commission should also acknowledge the role it plays in antagonizing American corporations on the world stage.
The commission's Directorate General for Competition is charged with evaluating mergers, prohibiting collusion, and monitoring for abuses of dominant market position. Such abuses, in the commission's eye, include "imposing unfair purchase or selling prices….limiting production, markets or technical development….and applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions." On this last basis alone, the commission brought at least five major lawsuits against American firms during President Joe Biden's administration.
Meta was fined more than $817 million for tying Facebook and Facebook Marketplace this November. In March, Apple was fined about $1.84 billion for preventing music streaming app developers from informing iPhone users about cheaper streaming services on the App Store. (Spotify—not Apple Music—made up 56 percent of Europe's music streaming market.) Intel was fined $384 million for conditional rebates and naked restrictions pertaining to the sale of computers featuring x86 CPUs in September 2023.
