WASHINGTON – Today, Competitiveness Coalition Chair Scott Brown praised Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Andrew Ferguson’s outspoken criticism of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA):
“Kudos to Chair Ferguson for highlighting the DMA’s ‘complex and burdensome rules’ that pose a serious and significant threat to American innovation,” said Chair Brown, a former United States Ambassador and Senator. “What a welcome change of pace from the Biden Administration, who sided with European regulators to handicap our homegrown success stories. The DMA and its impact on U.S. jobs, growth and investment is another chapter in the sad saga of Bidenomics that the Trump Administration is wisely reversing.”
Ferguson’s remarks occurred during a speech to global antitrust enforcers at the International Competition Network’s conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. He described the law as implementing, “rigid criteria to identify, in the first instance, the companies and their services that are subject to its complex and burdensome rules.”
Passed in 2022, the DMA targets America’s tech sector as 21 of the 22 core platform services obligated to meet the law’s unprecedented mandates (such as forced data sharing, interoperability) are U.S. companies. As noted by Bloomberg News, the law imposes, “a strict list of do’s and don’ts — or face the threat of significant fines.”
During the Biden Administration, both the FTC and Department of Justice (DOJ) dispatched respective taxpayer-funded agency officials to help with implementation. The FTC previewed this commitment in a March 2023 press release and a Politico EU report indicated that agency staff were dispatched to Brussels for six months to “provide technical assistance” to the European Commission. Consequently, the Competitiveness Coalition submitted a FOIA records request to get to the bottom of this suspected collusion between the Biden FTC and European regulators and response documents later shared by the FTC Office of Inspector General demonstrated that the entities worked closely together.
For more than three years, the Competitiveness Coalition has been sounding the alarm on the dangerous impact of overzealous antitrust efforts. To learn more about the Coalition’s work on this front, please visit www.competitivenesscoalition.com.
Members of the press can contact the coalition at press@competitivenesscoalition.com.
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The Competitiveness Coalition is a first-of-its-kind group educating the public and advocating for policies that put consumers first while fostering innovation and attracting new investment.