The news is grim: iRobot, the American company that pioneered the robotic vacuum with the Roomba, is on the brink of bankruptcy. After a final potential buyer walked away, the company is facing a catastrophic collapse. This isn’t just a simple business failure. It’s a strategic loss, and the blame lands squarely on the shoulders of European tech regulators and the Biden antitrust team that accommodated their agenda.
Thankfully, the Trump administration has thus far been aggressive with the EU and its member states regarding arbitrary and discriminatory regulations and the incessant fining of American tech companies. Unfortunately, U.S. antitrust regulators continue to pursue Biden-era cases against American tech companies along the same exact lines as these destructive EU efforts.
What happened to iRobot is a stark warning that the U.S. must not allow or legitimize foreign regulators to dictate the future of American industry, especially when the stakes involve our chief economic rival, China.
In January 2024, Amazon’s planned acquisition of iRobot was killed by the European Commission, which argued the deal might harm competition by allowing Amazon to favor Roomba on its marketplace. The move was supported by Biden’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC), led at the time by Chair Lina Khan, which had launched its own, similar probe to try to block the merger.
A much worse harm to competition is now tragically concrete because of these actions, with iRobot poised to exit the market altogether. The moment the deal collapsed, iRobot, which was already struggling, was left with crushing debt and no capital to innovate. The company immediately laid off over 350 employees—31% of its largely Massachusetts-based workforce. Now, as it faces total failure, this American company and the remainder of its American jobs are set to be wiped out.
The irony is staggering. While European regulators were busy protecting a theoretical market from a U.S. company, they effectively handed that same market to Chinese competitors.
iRobot makes vacuums, but it doesn’t operate in one. It was fighting for survival against a flood of cheaper models from rapidly expanding Chinese rivals like Ecovacs and Roborock. Turns out the Amazon acquisition was iRobot’s only viable path to gain the scale and resources needed to compete.
The EU’s decision didn’t save the consumer robotics market; it just cleared the field of one of America’s primary competitors. It was a protectionist move disguised as consumer protection, and it cost hundreds of American jobs and destroyed a flagship U.S. tech brand.
The EU doesn’t hold a monopoly on shame in this instance. American elected officials, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, appealed to Biden antitrust officials to collude against U.S. interests and oppose the deal. Those Biden regulators, in turn, actively encouraged the EU to do the dirty work. Former EU Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager even admitted they were in “close contact with the US Federal Trade Commission.”
The collapse of iRobot is not an isolated incident. It’s a single, disastrous battle in a much larger strategic conflict: the race for dominance in robotics, a key application of artificial intelligence. And right now, the U.S. is losing badly.
While American innovators have often excelled in service and consumer robotics (iRobot’s specialty), China is executing a ruthless national strategy to dominate the entire sector. The country is already lapping the U.S. In 2024, China installed nearly ten times more industrial robots than the U.S. With iRobot gone, America has effectively ceded the entire consumer robotics market—and the valuable data and AI knowledge that came with it—to its strategic competitors.
European regulators (with the help of Biden’s radical progressive antitrust agenda) didn’t just stop a merger. They crippled a key American company, killed hundreds of U.S. jobs and provided a massive, unearned victory to Chinese state-backed competitors.
This must be a wake-up call. The United States cannot be a passive observer, let alone an enabler, while its economic partners use regulatory power to hamstring its most innovative companies. If we are serious about competing with China in the technologies that will define the 21st century like AI and robotics, we must be willing to stand up for our own national and economic interests.
That starts with telling European regulators that we will not let their bureaucratic overreach destroy American jobs and industry nor emulate their short-sighted vision.
Image via Unsplash.