Following Apple’s recent Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC26), the global technology ecosystem has been buzzing over the massive overhaul and advanced features coming to Siri AI. However, more than 450 million consumers across the European Union will find themselves entirely left out of this next-generation technology when iOS 27 rolls out later this year. As a recent Washington Post editorial highlights, Apple’s decision to withhold its flagship AI assistant from European devices is the newest piece of evidence that Brussels’ Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a terrible law that actively hurts consumers.
The Real-World Harm of Brussels’ Red Tape
The European Commission’s heavy-handed enforcement of the DMA has effectively transformed the continent into a legacy market, punishing everyday consumers in the name of political theater. Under the guise of promoting “interoperability,” EU regulators demanded that Apple grant third-party applications and rival virtual assistants virtually unfettered access to users’ deeply sensitive personal data and device controls. Fearing profound privacy vulnerabilities and security hazards, Apple chose to delay Siri AI rather than break its own foundational security architecture.
The Digital Markets Act forces companies to redesign popular services based on bureaucratic preferences rather than consumer safety, leaving Europeans with degraded and less secure tech products.
This regulatory friction does not foster meaningful competition; instead, it denies an entire continent access to advanced writing tools, expanded visual intelligence, and autonomous device capabilities. As the Washington Post rightly pointed out, European consumers are paying a steep price for Brussels’ obsession with punishing American success.
Widening the Atlantic Tech Deficit
This is not an isolated incident, but part of a broader macro trend of innovative stagnation across the European continent. From Google’s Gemini to Meta’s Threads, cutting-edge American innovations are routinely delayed or completely blocked from reaching European markets due to innovation-killing red tape. While the United States continues to optimize for compute scale, compounding intelligence, and rapid free-enterprise growth, Europe remains mired in structural compliance and bureaucratic control.
You cannot regulate your way to technological relevance, and Europe’s digital protectionism is ensuring it falls further behind the world in terms of tech innovation. Instead of breeding homegrown competitors, the DMA has succeeded only in building a digital wall that locks European citizens away from market-leading services.
The Domestic Threat: DMA’s American Cousin
Despite the clear, real-time economic wreckage unfolding across the Atlantic, some lawmakers in Washington are still eager to import these failed European economic policies. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) seeks to replicate the bloated regulatory framework of the DMA here at home. By singling out a handful of leading American tech companies based solely on their size and reach, AICOA threatens to abandon the time-tested consumer welfare standard that has made the U.S. technology sector the envy of the world.
If passed, AICOA would undermine the integrated features, built-in security protections, and seamless account experiences that American families rely on every single day.
Importing Europe’s failed antitrust framework would cripple America’s competitive advantage in artificial intelligence at a time when we are locked in a fierce global race with adversarial foreign rivals.
We must learn from Europe’s self-inflicted stagnation and reject copycat legislation that punishes domestic success under the guise of competition. Rather than wrapping our most vibrant industries in innovation-killing red tape, Congress should champion a path that safeguards free expression and free enterprise.
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