The Troubling Global Ramifications of the EU's Digital Markets Act

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Lily Haak

August 20, 2026

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Much to the dismay of U.S. businesses, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the European Union's landmark digital platform-regulation framework, has not stayed confined to Europe.

Voluminous DMA regulations stemming from the European Commission already impose substantial costs and impact the day-to-day EU operations of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, threatening the companies with potential fines of 10 percent of annual global revenue. If enforced, any such fine would send shocks through the U.S. stock market and potentially the broader economy.

From Latin America to East Asia, governments are drawing on the same legal architecture to regulate a short list of mostly American firms. More than a dozen countries are now weighing digital rules modeled on the DMA.

But why so popular? The European Commission has supplied a ready-made template. Once a major market imposes obligations, the political cost of replicating them shrinks for others.

Compounding this, the United States has been ineffective in persuading the European Commission to modify or abandon the DMA and related measures, even though President Trump has been forcefully outspoken against the DMA and similar EU laws. So long as the EU pays no material price for exporting it, every capital reads that as permission to copy.

The result is convergence on a common design: governing large platforms through ex ante rules rather than proving harm case by case, bans on so-called self-preferencing, interoperability and data-portability mandates, limits on how user data is used.

DMA clones are appearing worldwide. In Brazil, Bill 4675/2025, submitted under President Lula's "Digital Brazil Agenda," would let the antitrust authority, CADE, designate firms of "systemic relevance" and impose obligations carrying penalties reaching 20% of annual revenue. By the government's own estimate, five to ten companies would be impacted, most of them American.

But after Washington folded the Brazil measure into a tariff dispute, the bill almost immediately lost its urgency. A vote is not expected, a sign of how fast the calculus shifts once the U.S. raises the perceived cost. Turkey recently introduced a draft reproducing the DMA's gatekeeper provisions verbatim. In South Korea, a swift U.S. pushback in 2025 paused new legislation, though more bills wait in the National Assembly.

This administration has been appropriately tough on the European Commission. In July 2026, after the Commission's roughly €890 million DMA fine on Google, President Trump announced a Section 301 investigation into the EU's digital rules.

A formal, hardline inquiry could spur the EU to reconsider its enforcement of the DMA, or encourage the process to repeal it.

The longer the United States waits to confront these laws, the harder it becomes to fight them. The burden compounds with every jurisdiction that signs on. Each new regime dictates how American companies design their products, use data and protect their systems, normalizing the treatment of U.S. technology as a regulated public utility. Damage inflicted on other non-tech focused businesses under these or other laws are also part of a larger anti-American agenda, designed to shake our trade dominance and domestic technology market.

American competitiveness abroad is not just a commercial concern, but a strategic imperative. Protecting the United States’ continued economic supremacy on a world stage starts by defeating legislation that threatens it.

Lily Haak is a Non-Resident Fellow with the Lexington Institute. She is an M.A. candidate in Economics at the University of Florida and the Student Director of the Digital Markets Initiative, a research group dedicated to competitive technological studies.

The Troubling Global Ramifications of the EU's Digital Markets Act

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