European Parliament Demands Faster DMA Enforcement as US Tariff Pressure Intensifies and MEPs Warn Against Foreign Interference
The European Parliament adopted a resolution on April 30 demanding the Commission use every enforcement tool against DMA-violating gatekeepers, as US tariff threats and visa sanctions aimed at EU officials escalate the transatlantic tech regulation conflict.
Overview
Two days after the European Commission published its first formal review of the Digital Markets Act and declared the regulation “fit for purpose,” the European Parliament adopted its own response. On April 30, 2026, MEPs approved a resolution demanding the Commission “quickly and consistently enforce” the DMA and make “full use of its enforcement powers,” according to the European Parliament. The vote coincided with a widening confrontation with the United States: the Trump administration has threatened tariff retaliation and has already imposed visa restrictions on European officials who helped draft the very rules MEPs are now asking the Commission to apply more rigorously.
As The Machine Herald previously reported, the Commission’s April 28 review concluded the DMA does not need to be revised and pointed enforcement attention toward AI and cloud computing. Parliament’s follow-on resolution is both an endorsement of that direction and a rebuke of the pace at which it is being pursued.
What the Parliament Resolution Says
The resolution, adopted by show of hands on April 30, 2026, calls on the Commission to deploy all instruments available under the DMA: regulatory dialogue, market investigations, non-compliance proceedings, inspections, interim measures, fines, and periodic penalty payments, per the European Parliament press release.
MEPs identified specific ongoing violations as requiring urgent action. The resolution names Google’s “self-preferencing practices,” TikTok’s “consent screens using behavioural techniques,” Microsoft’s alteration of “default settings,” and Booking.com’s “continued use of prohibited parity clauses” as examples of gatekeeper non-compliance, according to the European Parliament.
Parliament also expressed regret over what it called the “modest fines imposed on Meta and Apple,” signalling that MEPs believe the penalties levied so far do not function as genuine deterrents, according to the European Parliament. Apple received a €500 million fine in April 2025 for blocking App Store developers from directing users to cheaper offers outside the store, while Meta received €200 million for its “consent-or-pay” advertising model — fines that Agustín Reyna, Director General of the European Consumer Organisation, told Euronews fell short of what is needed. “Enforcement by the European Commission is fundamental,” Reyna said, adding that “there is a point where dialogues also have a limit.”
Reyna also pointed to structural friction in how gatekeepers are implementing compliance changes, telling Euronews: “There is a ping-pong between the Commission and the gatekeepers…This is simply delaying much-needed changes.” Consumer surveys cited by Euronews found that approximately 66% of frequent users report longer searches and more steps for digital tasks following gatekeeper compliance changes, a pattern critics attribute to deliberate design friction.
On the technology frontier, Parliament highlighted cloud computing and AI-driven search tools as priorities, specifically citing Google’s AI Overview feature as requiring closer scrutiny under the DMA framework, according to the European Parliament. The Commission’s first DMA review had already named cloud and AI enforcement as forward priorities, with three market investigations into whether Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be designated as gatekeepers expected to produce designation decisions by November 2026 and a final investigation conclusion in May 2027, as TechPolicy.Press reported.
Andreas Schwab, the MEP from the European People’s Party who served as the DMA’s rapporteur in Parliament, offered a qualified endorsement of the Commission’s review conclusions, telling Euronews: “I broadly agree with the European Commission’s assessment [..] [but] digital markets evolve rapidly, and the framework should not be seen as static, in particular with regards to AI and cloud.” He added that “concerns about unintended consequences should be taken seriously, but they are often overstated [..]. There is so far limited evidence of systemic negative spillovers.”
The Sovereignty Dimension
The resolution’s most pointed passage addresses the transatlantic dimension directly. MEPs warned that “political pressure from third countries seeking to weaken the DMA” should not “compromise the EU’s sovereignty and autonomy to enforce its own rules,” according to the European Parliament.
The US campaign against EU digital regulation has escalated across multiple fronts. In January 2026, the Department of State imposed visa restrictions on five European officials involved in drafting the DMA and the Digital Services Act, according to CSIS. That followed the US Trade Representative’s March 2025 designation of both laws as digital trade barriers in its annual National Trade Estimate report, and threats of additional tariffs issued in August 2025 against countries with “digital taxes, legislation or regulations,” per CSIS.
The Office of the US Trade Representative has been explicit about the stakes. TechRadar reported the USTR warning: “If the EU and EU Member States insist on continuing to restrict…the United States will have no choice but to begin using every tool at its disposal.” The administration named European companies — including Spotify, SAP, Siemens, Capgemini, DHL, Accenture, and Mistral AI — as potential retaliation targets, according to TechRadar.
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick pressed EU officials to roll back tech regulation in exchange for concessions in steel and aluminum trade negotiations, an approach Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Competition, characterized as “blackmail,” according to TechPolicy.Press. Ribera’s position has been consistent: “the European digital rulebook is not up for negotiation,” as TechPolicy.Press reported, and “There have been moments that we have needed to, where I have needed to, stand up and say: sorry, but we’re not going to undo our regulation just because you don’t like [it],” as the Irish Times reported.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also threatened to bar European officials from entering the United States, telling The Irish Times that Washington would “bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”
Green Party MEP Alexandra Geese framed the situation starkly to PYMNTS.com: “There is an attack on our democracy going on, led by the tech oligarchs on social media.”
Critically, the Commission’s own DMA review was silent on the US pressure campaign — an omission flagged by independent experts. Aline Blankertz, Tech Economy Lead at Rebalance Now, told TechPolicy.Press that this silence was a “huge concern not just for competition enforcement, but for the credibility of the European project.”
What Is Measurably Working
Despite the enforcement disputes, the DMA’s two years of operation have produced concrete changes that were not possible before the law took effect. Euronews reported that users of BirdyChat, a Latvian startup, can now exchange messages with people on WhatsApp — interoperability that was technically and legally impossible before the DMA’s obligations applied. Reyna of BEUC confirmed the milestone: “Today, consumers are able to choose their preferred browser on iOS through what we call a choice screen. We also started to see that consumers are able to exchange messages from BirdyChat with someone who is on WhatsApp.”
The Commission’s review, drawing on 450 consultation contributions, found that more than 40 companies have built new services enabled by the law’s data access and interoperability obligations, according to Euronews.
The enforcement record also includes larger fines. Google was hit with a €2.95 billion penalty in November 2025 for abusing dominance in advertising technology, according to TechPolicy.Press, alongside which Ribera warned that if behavioral remedies proved inadequate, “the only way forward is to impose remedies, structural remedies, we will do it.” In December 2025, the EU levied a €120 million fine on X — the first under the Digital Services Act — for DSA transparency violations, according to The Irish Times.
What We Don’t Know
Several key questions remain open.
First, the gap between Parliament’s call for faster proceedings and the Commission’s actual enforcement calendar is structurally difficult to close. DMA investigations are procedurally intensive and regularly run longer than the 12-month guideline, according to TechPolicy.Press. Whether the resolution translates into shortened timelines or higher interim-measure usage is not specified.
Second, the US-EU tech trade dispute lacks a visible off-ramp. The administration has embedded anti-digital-regulation clauses into bilateral trade deals with at least nine countries, according to CSIS, but Brussels has kept its digital rules out of trade negotiations entirely. Whether any broader trade framework between Washington and Brussels creates a channel to de-escalate the digital dispute has not been established.
Third, the Commission’s DMA review declines to designate generative AI as a new core platform service but leaves open the possibility of using the existing virtual assistants category for future AI designations, as TechPolicy.Press noted. Parliament’s resolution explicitly calls for scrutiny of AI tools like Google’s AI Overview, but the legal pathway to DMA obligations for those products has not yet been specified.
Analysis
The Parliament resolution and the US pressure campaign have exposed the same underlying dynamic from opposite directions: the DMA’s enforcement teeth are being tested by both the companies subject to it and by the government that most represents those companies’ interests abroad.
Parliament’s regret over “modest fines” is a structural criticism of the DMA’s penalty regime. The fines against Apple and Meta — €500 million and €200 million respectively — are described by MEPs as insufficient deterrents for platforms of that scale. For a law whose stated purpose is behavioral change at scale, one-time penalties that companies can absorb without structural behavioral change are a recognized limitation. The resolution’s call for “periodic penalty payments” — recurring penalties for ongoing violations — is an operationally distinct tool from lump-sum fines, but its use has been limited.
On the US side, the visa sanctions and USTR designations represent a deliberate choice to treat EU digital regulation as a trade dispute rather than a sovereign legislative matter. The CSIS analysis documented how the administration embedded anti-regulation clauses into bilateral agreements with at least nine countries, constructing what amounts to a coalition of digitally deferential trade partners as leverage on Brussels. The EU has not reciprocated in kind, and Ribera’s public language — “blackmail,” “not up for negotiation” — suggests the Commission does not intend to.
The DMA’s seven designated gatekeepers collectively operate platforms that EU citizens use daily: the 23 designated gateway services include search engines with almost 90% market share in EU search queries and messaging platforms with over 90% market share in some EU countries, per TechPolicy.Press. Parliament’s resolution is, in that sense, a political signal that the regulation’s legitimacy rests not on its deterrent fines alone, but on whether gatekeepers meaningfully change the way those platforms behave for users and businesses who have no alternative. If they do not, the pressure for structural remedies — which Ribera has already placed on the table — will grow.