Published on Aug 01, 2025
American characterizations of EU fines on U.S. technology giants under the bloc’s digital rules as de facto taxes or tariffs are a way for the Trump administration to ramp up political pressure on the bloc, said Olivier Guersent, the former top antitrust enforcer at the European Commission for the last five and a half years, in an exit interview.
Guersent, the EC’s former Directorate-General for Competition (DG Comp) who spent almost three decades at the agency, told The Capitol Forum in a wide-ranging interview that he also views the U.S. merger review process as “uncertain” and criticized the EU’s “dreadful” track record of accepting investment remedies.
On the Trump administration’s criticism of EU antitrust fines as taxes, Guersent, who left his post on Thursday, said: “They don’t really believe it.”
“It’s convenient to say that it is. It increases the pressure on other grounds,” the former senior official said in the interview, reaffirming his focus on enforcing the bloc’s antitrust rules. Guersent also noted that the U.S. “invented” policing market power excesses “in the 19th century,” and are still, today, “one of the strongest enforcers” of competition rules across sectors.
Asked if the EU was working on a committee made up of tech representatives and EU officials to discuss how to enforce the digital rules and potentially water down the rules, Guersent said he had “no comment.” He stressed, however, that tech enforcement was not part of the trade negotiations with the U.S. and highlighted shared values between Americans and Europeans when it comes to tough competition enforcement.
In the months before the trade deal reached Sunday, as European negotiators sought to dissuade Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs on EU exports, the U.S. president bashed the EU’s “ridiculous corporate penalties” on U.S. firms and suggested that the bloc levies a digital services tax on American Big Tech companies while threatening higher duties in response. EU member states including France, Spain, Austria and Italy have some form of digital services tax, or DST, but the bloc has failed to agree on an EU-wide digital levy. Reports that trade officials from both sides have included the EU’s digital antitrust rules, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), in tariff negotiations have raised concerns that the bloc might undermine enforcement of its own sovereign laws to avoid further trade retaliation.
Trump’s comments followed a White House memorandum earlier this year that directed federal agencies to examine potential trade retaliation against foreign governments that have been “appropriating revenues” from U.S. tech companies. The action, which focused on DSTs, also cited “other forms of unfair fines, practices, and penalties that undermine the ability of American companies to operate as intended and force them to incur additional compliance costs,” including DMA specifically.
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has reportedly described the EU’s fines on Big Tech under the DMA as “sort of like a form of taxing American companies.” Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company is appealing a €200 million DMA sanction, has also compared EU fines to tariffs.
“Nobody believes, really, that it is” a tariff, Guersent said.
The EU has the same right to enforce its laws within its jurisdiction as the U.S. does, he added, speaking before the US and the EU reached a trade deal. “That has nothing to do with a near tariff or whatever of this kind. And I understand, actually, the DMA is nowhere on the table of the discussions with the United States, and that’s a good thing.”
Between the EU enforcers and their U.S. counterparts, Guersent said of strong competition enforcement, “Frankly, there are hardly any other values that [are] as shared as this one.”
He cited the DOJ’s cases against Google (GOOG) over what judges have deemed its monopolies in search and advertising technology. Judges in both cases are now weighing breakups of the company, a remedy Guersent said reflects “more the American culture ever since Standard Oil [was broken up by the Supreme Court following a DOJ lawsuit] in the beginning of the 20th century.”
In Europe, meanwhile, “you will likely see structural remedies remaining very, very exceptional in the future,” he said. “But they need to be there, and they’re there as well in the DMA, because at some point, if you have no other way to stop the reiteration of infringement, maybe you would have to do this.”
DMA enforcement constraints. Guersent’s successor will be tasked with the continued rollout of the landmark law to rein in Big Tech abuses of power with a chronically stretched staff. Officials have prioritized the most “blatant” cases of infringements, but “that doesn’t necessarily mean all the rest is great,” Guersent said.
A commission review of the DMA is due May 3, 2026. Public commenters are sure to write in response to the enforcer’s consultation on the review that the law should apply to other areas of the digital sector like cloud services and proliferating artificial intelligence tools. While cloud services are defined as a “core platform service” under the DMA, none have been designated, meaning they don’t have to fall in line with the law’s prescriptions. Virtual assistants likewise are included in the definition, though none have been designated.
Guersent said he would have liked for DG Comp staff to weigh potential new designations alongside enforcing obligations on designated services.
“In an ideal world, I would like to have the luxury of having put already for months some people to have a look at whether we should designate cloud services as a platform service, and if so, which would be the gatekeepers there and how they should be designated, for example,” he said. “We didn’t do it because we cannot afford it, and we thought it’s more important to show that it works for those that are already designated.
“If we had more staffing, we would be quicker,” he said. “For the time being, I have to displace people [who] were not exactly doing nothing previously to do something else.”
Merger uncertainty. Guersent said U.S. enforcement is more unpredictable than the EU’s despite the EC having “always been more interventionist” than the U.S.
The EU enforcer has recently been criticized over the way it handles reviews of deals that don’t meet notification thresholds. After the bloc’s top court quashed its new policy of calling in such deals itself, the agency now relies on referrals from EU member countries.
“I’ve heard a lot of things about how terrible it is for legal certainty in Europe,” Guersent said. “Well, go to the U.S. You will see what uncertainty means.”
“They have a different system than ours, which is that they can handpick cases,” he clarified. “So it can be very quick or very long, if you’re the handpicked one – and it’s also much more uncertain.”
‘Dreadful’ investment remedy record. Guersent leaves his post while DG Comp is overhauling its merger guidance to better align its reviews with the EU’s political and economic realities. Much of the discussion has centred on whether – and if so, how – merger enforcement should relax or change to more easily allow for the creation of European champions.
Guersent reiterated his long-held belief that merger enforcement is not to blame for any lack of European champions. But he did concede that the merger guidelines would likely shift to allow the agency to consider efficiency defenses and investment remedies – which Mario Draghi’s report on EU competitiveness highlights when discussing how EU competition policy should adapt to facilitate defense and telecoms consolidation in particular.
“There might be markets in which it’s necessary to be big in order to be able to invest,” Guersent said, specifically noting sectors with high sunk costs and long investment cycles.
While “nine out 10” cases where merging companies argue they need market power to invest can be resolved with divestitures, Guersent said the enforcer is also assessing how to account for deals that might not be resolvable structurally.
“Maybe there’s nothing to do,” he added. “Maybe it can work only in very regulated sectors in which you can kind of force and monitor the investment, because our experience with investment commitments in mergers and in antitrust is actually dreadful.”
Guersent said the agency has previously accepted investment remedies in three cases “and in none of the three did the companies fulfill the promise of investment.”
Though he didn’t identify any specific cases, in 2002 the EC allowed a consortium of energy companies to take over Spanish utility provider Hidrocantábrico partly conditioned on EDF investing in an interconnector between Spain and France that never materialized.
Such cases generally involve long-term investment cycles, so Guersent questioned what the EC could do if it ultimately finds the investment promises haven’t played out a decade later. “You don’t demerge,” he said. “So it’s a bit complicated.”
Another complication from the Draghi report, Guersent added, is the new pressure on DG Comp to account for resilience in merger analysis even when doing so might conflict with core concepts of competition.
“Partly that would lead you to prohibit more, because […] competition does diversification a lot better than monopolies,” he said. “Everything that we take into account currently as efficiencies in order to excuse a merger that otherwise would create monopoly power is about decreasing the resilience.”
