Anti-American Antitrust: How Foreign Governments Target U.S. Businesses
2025-12-16
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Source: Congress.gov
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Subcommittee will come to order without objection. The chair is authorized to declare recess at any time. We welcome everyone to today's hearing on foreign antitrust laws and their effect on American companies. I will now recognize myself for an opening statement. If you want to beat your competitors, one option is to out-innovate them. Another is to regulate them. And unfortunately, foreign governments are increasingly choosing the second option. That is what today's hearing is about, and a growing effort to rewrite the rules of the global economy in a way that punishes success targets American innovation and leaves consumers worse off. The blueprint for this effort is the European Union Digital Markets Act. For over half a century, antitrust law has been grounded in a simple principle, protect consumers by promoting competition. But the DMA flips that principle on its head. It protects competitors from competition without even considering how that might affect consumers. The DMA does not ask whether consumers have been harmed. It does not even ask whether a business has done anything wrong. It asks whether a company is large, successful, and most importantly, American. If the answer is yes, the rules suddenly change. Common business practices are banned, innovation is treated as a threat, and foreign rivals are handed access to data and technology that they could never build or earn on their own. That is not competition policy, that's forced redistribution, and we should not pretend that this came out of nowhere. Europe's economy has declined rapidly over the past several decades. As the Drogi report highlighted, no EU company with a market capitalization over 100 billion euros has been created from scratch in the last 50 years. Meanwhile, all six companies with a $1 trillion valuation have been created in America over that same period.
30% of the quote-unquote unicorn businesses founded in Europe, they are startups with a valuation exceeding $1 billion. They've all relocated their headquarters abroad at this point. Talented European engineers are frequently choosing San Francisco and Seattle over Berlin and Paris and taking with them They're innovative ideas and patented technologies. Instead of confronting over-regulation and weak economic growth, EU officials have chosen a different path. They target American companies and call it regulation, tax innovation and call it fairness. Well, what should concern us most is that this model is now spreading globally. We are seeing it in South Korea, and we're seeing it in Brazil, and we are even seeing it in countries like Japan and Australia. Different countries, but the same framework. Laws that single out American businesses, restrict pro-consumer conduct, enhance sweeping power to regulators and bureaucrats with virtually no accountability or due process. The activists behind these proposals call it competition policy, but in reality, it's industrial policy designed to give their own corporations a geopolitical edge. This is not a coincidence. It is coordination. The simple is The strategy is simple, copy American innovation and then fine and regulate the companies that created out of existence. This is not a technical debate among different regulators. It is a values test. Do we believe in competition driven by consumers and innovation or competition dictated by bureaucrats and foreign ministries? United States has always chosen the first path. We let markets work. We punish real harm and we reward innovation. America built the strongest economy in the history of this world by trusting consumers, not regulators. The DMA-style regulation would take us in exactly the opposite direction.
It would raise prices, reduce choice, weaken privacy and security, and slow innovation. It would replace consumer judgment with regulatory command. That is why the Trump administration has been pushing back on these discriminatory tactics. Free trade does not mean tolerating attacks on the very principles that created our great economic system.
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