An increasing number of countries in recent years have begun targeting America’s leading technology firms with policies touted as measures to promote fair competition, protect consumers, or enhance national sovereignty. However, the reality is that these regulations impose disproportionate burdens on large U.S. companies. What started as European efforts to rein in dominant tech companies, ostensibly to create space for local competitors, has evolved into a global playbook that extracts revenue from American firms while using behind-the-border regulations to create market barriers. The map below shows how these policies have spread globally in the last 15 years. As ITIF’s Aegis Project is documenting in its Big Tech Policy Tracker, dozens of countries now have anti-U.S. tech policies already in force or actively under consideration.

Figure 1: Number of laws and regulations targeting U.S. Big Tech

The data behind this map comes from Digital Policy Alert’s Activity Tracker, which monitors and categorizes laws and regulations affecting digital markets worldwide. Each jurisdiction is assessed based on the presence of policies across multiple regulatory areas that place significant burdens on U.S. technology firms. The more categories a country has policies in, the higher that country’s regulatory burden. This dataset illustrates the global spread of protectionist policies that, while often framed as competition or consumer protection measures, primarily target large American tech companies.

The most prominent policies currently being aimed at big U.S. tech companies include those related to competition, content moderation, data localization, digital service taxes, exorbitant fines and fees, and local content requirements, as follows.

Competition Policy

Governments around the world are implementing aggressive antitrust measures targeting large U.S. tech companies, with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) being the most well-known example. The DMA classifies “gatekeepers” based on revenue and market share—with criteria that almost exclusively affect American firms. A significant provision is the ban on self-preferencing, which forces companies like Google to overhaul their search algorithms. For example, the DMA has forced Google to adjust its search results in ways that have resulted in hotels, airlines, and retailers receiving 30 percent fewer direct booking clicks, meaning that they now must pay intermediaries commissions for referrals instead of getting free traffic from Google. Similarly, these rules have caused Google to remove useful features such as the location of hotels from its maps in some countries. Rather than enhancing competition, these changes degrade the user experience for consumers by forcing American companies like Google to dismantle the innovations that made their services valuable.

Beyond self-preferencing, the DMA mandates interoperability measures that require big tech platforms to open their closed ecosystems to competitors. For instance, Apple is now required to allow third-party access to essential features such as notifications, file sharing, and device pairing on iOS. Although the ostensible goal is to increase competition, this requirement compels Apple to dismantle the tightly integrated design that has been central to its success, increasing both compliance costs and security risks. This degradation of a seamless user experience ultimately undermines the value that integrated ecosystems offer consumers. These interoperability requirements also allow competitors to free ride on Apple’s innovations, thereby hindering innovation as companies lose the motivation to invest in groundbreaking technologies because their competitive advantage is effectively relinquished.

What began as a European regulatory trial has now proliferated worldwide, with similar laws emerging in India, Turkey, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The collective effect creates a fragmented regulatory environment that shifts resources from innovation to legal risk management, unfairly burdens American tech firms, and ultimately stifles both competition and consumer choice.

Content Moderation

Regulations aimed at content moderation have introduced another layer of complexity for U.S. tech companies. The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) has established a new benchmark by requiring large platforms to remove illegal or harmful content with unprecedented speed and efficiency, sometimes in 24 hours or less. In theory, these rules are intended to protect users, but in practice, they compel U.S. companies to act as the enforcement arms of foreign governments. In nations such as Australia, India, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, platforms are required to remove content on government orders within very tight deadlines, lacking the due process many believe should serve as a safeguard in such situations. This urgent need to comply with multiple and often conflicting content standards leads U.S. companies to invest significant resources to monitor, filter, and moderate content across all markets. The ultimate result is an operational squeeze that not only raises costs but also jeopardizes the principles of free expression that have historically characterized American innovation.

Data Localization

Data-localization policies, which mandate companies to store data within a country’s borders, have become a common regulatory tool worldwide. Governments justify these regulations by citing national security and data privacy concerns, but in practice, they impose significant economic burdens on U.S. tech companies while providing local competitors with an unfair advantage. For U.S. firms, these mandates result in increased costs and operational inefficiencies. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, which depend on global cloud networks, must establish regional data centers in every country with such laws, significantly raising infrastructure expenses. Several countries, including China, Russia, India, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia, have implemented some of the strictest data-localization laws, requiring businesses to store data within national borders and imposing stringent restrictions on cross-border data transfers.

Restrictive data-localization policies have significant negative economic consequences. They diminish trade volumes, elevate operational costs for businesses, increase import prices, and stifle innovation by obstructing access to global data networks. Rather than promoting economic growth, these regulations encourage protectionism, making it more difficult for U.S. tech firms to compete while protecting local companies from international competition.

Beyond economic harm, data-localization rules can even weaken cybersecurity since data cannot be backed up in foreign data centers. Forcing companies to store data locally can also make them more vulnerable to government surveillance and cyberattacks. Yet, despite these risks, governments continue to push for even stricter data residency requirements, further eroding the free flow of information that underpins the global digital economy. Ultimately, data localization is a regulatory burden disguised as a security measure—one that disproportionately harms U.S. tech companies, global trade, and even local economies.

Digital Service Taxes

An increasing number of countries have implemented Digital Service Taxes (DSTs) specifically aimed at generating revenue from U.S. tech companies under the pretense of fairness. These taxes target large digital firms—almost exclusively American—while exempting domestic competitors.

For example, Canada’s proposed 3 percent DST would retroactively impose taxes on large U.S. tech companies for revenue generated in Canada over the past two years. Meanwhile, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom have also enacted narrowly designed DSTs that primarily target U.S. companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon rather than fairly taxing digital revenue across all firms.

Beyond being discriminatory, DSTs violate long-standing international tax agreements by taxing the same revenue multiple times. They also increase consumer costs—as in France, where streaming services like Spotify passed the tax burden onto users—and create an unstable business environment, discouraging further investment in digital markets.

Exorbitant Fines and Fees

Across the world, governments are leveraging digital regulations to extract enormous penalties from major tech companies. This regulatory environment prioritizes punishment over innovation, and fines, often amounting to billions of dollars, have become a primary tool for enforcing digital sovereignty and asserting control over American firms.

From South Korea to Australia, regulators are implementing aggressive enforcement strategies modeled on the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These laws impose penalties of up to 10 percent of a company’s global revenue for a single violation, with even stricter consequences for repeat offenses. For companies like Meta, Apple, and Google, this means billions in fines for alleged regulatory breaches—often in instances where the purported harm to consumers is questionable at best.

The European Commission has imposed record antitrust fines on U.S. firms, arguing that their business practices hinder competition. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has also stepped in, issuing penalties related to app store policies that it claims disadvantage local businesses.

In addition to fines, some countries have implemented policies specifically designed to extract fees from U.S. tech companies. Canada and Australia have introduced laws requiring tech firms to compensate news publishers. Meanwhile, India and Brazil are advocating for similar regulations that identify American tech companies as dominant “gatekeepers” whose market power needs to be restricted through significant penalties and compliance requirements.

The weaponization of fines and fees as a tool for economic protectionism is counterproductive. Governments claim to be leveling the playing field, but in reality, they are eroding incentives for technological investment and innovation. The result is not a more competitive digital economy but rather an increasingly fragmented one, where American firms face regulatory hurdles that their local counterparts do not.

Local Content Mandates

Local content mandates are compelling global tech companies, predominantly American, to invest considerable portions of their revenue into local film, TV, and music content. Rather than simply allowing market forces to determine audience preferences, these mandates necessitate platforms to re-engineer their services—often at significant cost—to meet quotas and financial obligations.

U.S. tech companies are essentially being compelled to subsidize local content. For example, in Europe, streaming platforms face regulations that require them to allocate a significant percentage of their catalogs for European works, with penalties pending for noncompliance. Similar policies are emerging in countries such as Australia, Canada, and South Africa, each enforcing its own set of regulations—from mandatory investment quotas to algorithmic modifications aimed at promoting local content.

These laws distort market competition and force companies to redirect valuable resources from innovation to compliance. Rather than competing based on the quality and relevance of their services, U.S. tech companies are now encumbered by the added responsibility of funding cultural preservation—a task traditionally borne by government subsidies or private investment. Essentially, these mandates create a protectionist framework, and U.S. tech companies find themselves in a tenuous situation—having to serve as subsidizers of local content while also striving to maintain the innovation and global competitiveness that have characterized their success for years.

The Economic Toll on U.S. Tech

The proliferation of targeted regulations against large U.S. tech companies is symptomatic of a global shift toward digital protectionism. Antitrust regulations, content moderation requirements, data localization mandates, digital service taxes, exorbitant fines, and local content requirements all reveal a clear pattern: These measures are designed to unfairly burden and extract revenue from American Big Tech.

Rather than fostering competition, these policies force large U.S. tech companies to divert critical resources from innovation to compliance and legal defense, effectively turning them into subsidizers of local content and targets for excessive fines. Such protectionist policies not only undermine fairness but also threaten the fabric of the American tech ecosystem. When resources are siphoned away from the tech industry, the ability to provide efficient services, drive innovation, and contribute to the economy is compromised.