Sounding off: French President Emmanuel Macron warns that enforcement of the European Union's flagship digital laws against major US platforms is moving too slowly, blaming what he calls growing American pressure on Brussels. Macron argues that long-running investigations under the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act have become entangled in a broader transatlantic fight over trade and tech sovereignty.
At a town hall in France's Vosges region on Friday, Macron said some Digital Services Act cases targeting large online platforms have been sitting at the European Commission for about two years, a timeline he described as far too long for rules that were sold as a sharp break from past hands-off oversight of Big Tech. He framed the issue not as a procedural delay but as a strategic clash, saying the EU is engaged in a "geopolitical battle" over its ability to impose content and competition rules on mostly American-owned platforms that dominate European digital markets.
Macron's core allegation is that many officials within the European Commission and in national capitals are reluctant to pursue aggressive enforcement because they fear an "American offensive" against the EU's new regime for digital services and markets.
Macron distinguished this pressure from older worries about Russian interference, saying the current resistance to strict enforcement stems from US actors and the platforms themselves, which he said "do not want us to bother them." The remarks underscore how the DSA and DMA, initially presented as technical rulebooks to govern online content and platform power, are now firmly embedded in a broader power struggle between Brussels and Washington.
The timing of Macron's intervention is not accidental. His comments landed at the end of a week in which US officials again tried to tie relief from steel and aluminum tariffs to concessions on the EU's tech rulebooks. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged EU ministers on Monday to "reconsider" the DSA and DMA in exchange for lower metal tariffs.
Those rulebooks have remained a target for the US administration and for tech executives since President Donald Trump returned to office, with Washington repeatedly signaling that it sees some of the EU's obligations on large platforms as discriminatory against American firms.
Inside the EU system, top digital officials have pushed back on that line. The bloc's tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, and competition chief, Teresa Ribera, both rejected the idea that the EU should soften or slow its digital enforcement in response to US demands. Ribera went further, accusing Washington of "blackmail" over the linkage between tariff relief and changes to digital rules.
At the same time, the European Commission itself is under pressure from lawmakers in the European Parliament, where the Socialists and Democrats group is driving an initiative to create a formal inquiry committee to scrutinize how the Commission is enforcing the DSA and DMA, and whether it is moving fast enough against systemic platforms.
The Commission defends its approach as methodical rather than hesitant. Spokesperson Thomas Regnier responded to Macron by insisting that Brussels "is fully behind" its digital legislation and is actively enforcing it. Still, he emphasized that some DSA investigations are inherently broader than others because they address several systemic risk categories at once.
Regnier said Commission services are focused on building robust, court-proof cases, stressing that the objective is not only to launch investigations but to prevail if companies challenge decisions before the EU's courts.
The Commission has opened DSA investigations into several high-profile services, including X, Meta's platforms, AliExpress, Temu, and TikTok. These cases focus on how each company handles systemic risks, including disinformation, illegal content, minors' exposure to harmful material, advertising transparency, and the design of its recommendation and discovery features.
The potential penalties are significant: a 6 percent global turnover fine would equate to multi-billion-euro exposure for the largest firms. Yet, despite the legal tools on the books, no fines have been imposed so far under these specific DSA probes, feeding political frustrations in capitals like Paris about the pace and visibility of enforcement.