Big Tech Policy

Please join ITIF’s Aegis Project for an expert panel discussion with leaders from the Council on Global Competitiveness and Innovation (CGCI) and Shield Capital as we examine the vital role Big Tech plays in U.S. technology leadership and national security.

The European Commission’s DMA action against Meta reveals a strategy of using data protection law principles to stretch competition rules beyond their intended scope—ultimately setting a compliance bar no gatekeeper can meet, infantilizing users, and selectively targeting successful integrated American platforms.

Space safety is an important and shared interest of governments, private industry, and consumers around the world. But a regulatory framework for it should be evidence-based and even-handed. If the EUSA proceeds, we can expect the same proliferation of copycat space regulations through the Brussels effect.

Policymakers seeking to rein in or break up market-leading tech firms should consider a more balanced approach that recognizes the crucial role they play in strengthening America in its intensifying economic and geopolitical competition with China.

As senior South Korean and U.S. officials prepare to reconvene in Washington, the Korean government’s quiet decision to shelve the Platform Monopoly Act while fast-tracking the Online Platform Fairness Act sends a troubling signal. Though framed as a more balanced alternative, the Fairness Act potentially represents another form of non-tariff attack on U.S. tech firms, posing an even greater threat to innovation, legal certainty, and the broader U.S.–Korea economic relationship.

The Trump administration should push back against foreign governments enacting policies specifically tailored to undermine American tech companies and US leadership.

In its push for digital sovereignty, the European Commission is reportedly planning to replace Microsoft Azure with the French cloud provider OVHcloud or another European alternative. But this move, while politically symbolic, would be costly. Far from enhancing security, this migration would sacrifice sound procurement and EU legal obligations in service of a hollow vision of digital nationalism.

Policymakers must justify why they should be allowed to tax the major digital companies differently from the leading firms in other industries. This challenge explains why so much of the DST debate has centered around obscure and abstract notions of a company’s “physical presence” and whether the company’s users “create value.”

Foreign governments are systematically deploying policies that constitute non-tariff attacks (NTAs) on America’s leading technology companies. ITIF and other think tank scholars and policy experts urge the administration to put these unfair NTAs on the U.S. trade agenda and insist that America’s trading partners address them.

For Trump, it’s a new world and Korean President Lee Jae Myung and his administration needs to treat it as such by negotiating a new deal that preserves Korean market access to America in exchange for real concessions on what at the end of the day are relatively minor things for Korean economic competitiveness.