How Big Tech lost the antitrust battle with Europe

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg | Margrethe Vestager and Thierry Breton)

Andy Yen has big dreams for ProtonMail, the secure email service he founded in 2014 that now has 50 million users worldwide. One day, he hopes, it could be a rival to Gmail, the communications behemoth owned by Google, which boasts over 1.5 billion users.

But he says Proton can never be a true competitor to Google while the Internet continues to be an unregulated Wild West. We grow based on the goodwill of tech giants," Yen says from his head office in Geneva. In fact, he says, the same goes for his company's very existence. Tech giants could today remove us from the Internet with zero legal or financial repercussions."

Like Proton, many companies across Europe are pinning their hopes on the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU's first overhaul of the rules that govern competition on the Internet in 20 years. It is one of two major pieces of technology legislation in the works in Brussels; the other is the Digital Services Act (DSA), which will cover areas such as privacy and data use.

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