Competition policy: Enforce without fear

On 5 July, the European Parliament adopted a report assessing the EU’s competition policy, a critical tool for defending its values. The message is clear: enforce, enforce, enforce. Context: the Commission faces relentless pressure from the Trump administration to soften its stance, especially on the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU law reining in Big Tech’s market dominance (e.g., stopping Google from favouring its own services or Meta from merging Facebook and WhatsApp data).

The report slams the DMA’s implementation as "suboptimal". Stéphanie Yon-Courtin (Renaissance/France), the report’s author, demands systematic, rigorous, and independent enforcement: "Competition decisions must be free from politics. Full stop. In every EU country, national competition authorities stand apart from government. Not at EU level. Here, it's the Commission, a political body, that holds the pen. That's how competition decisions get politicised. That shouldn't be. My report calls for assessing whether competition powers should leave the Commission altogether, for a truly independent authority. One that wouldn't flinch when Trump calls.”

Stéphanie Yon-Courtin’s report also calls for more staff to enforce competition policy and a more systematic and a “DMA fee” to ensure the regulator has stable, independent source of funding.

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