If you’ve clicked “Accept All Cookies” for what feels like the billionth time, you’ve experienced something most Americans never think about: European regulation.
Those seemingly endless privacy banners that now clutter every website didn’t appear because Congress passed a law. They became ubiquitous because the European Union’s privacy rules forced companies to redesign their websites, and rather than maintain one experience for Europe and another for the rest of the world, many adopted the same design.
It’s a minor inconvenience, but it illustrates a larger trend. Increasingly, regulations written in Brussels are shaping the digital experience of American consumers.
The European Union has become one of the world’s most influential technology regulators, and because America’s largest technology companies operate globally, European rules frequently become global rules.
This phenomenon is often called the “Brussels Effect.” The term was coined by Columbia Law professor Anu Bradford, who argues that the EU’s large market and regulatory regime often compel multinational companies to adopt European standards worldwide rather than incur great expense to maintain separate systems for different markets. Instead, companies redesign their products to satisfy Europe’s strictest requirements and deploy those changes worldwide.
The result? European regulations effectively become U.S. standards without any debate among American lawmakers. American consumers are increasingly living under rules they never voted for.
For example, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect in 2018, fundamentally changed how companies collect and process personal data. In response, companies such as Google and Facebook announced they would extend many GDPR protections globally rather than create separate systems for Europe and the rest of the world.
The most visible consequence has been the inundation of cookie consent banners. While GDPR was intended to strengthen user privacy, academic research suggests the endless stream of cookie notices has produced widespread “consent fatigue.”
Rather than evaluating privacy choices, many users simply click “accept” to continue browsing. Researchers examining thousands of websites have also found that many cookie banners fail to comply with GDPR requirements, undermining the transparency they were meant to provide.
Now Europe’s regulatory influence is reaching even further into the United States. Policymakers in Washington and state legislatures propose borrowing European technology laws without fully considering whether those policies achieve their intended goals overseas.
The Digital Markets Act seeks to create in the U.S. what the European Commission calls “fairer and more contestable digital markets” by imposing new obligations on designated “gatekeeper” platforms. These rules restrict certain forms of self-preferencing, meaning they can’t treat their own services or products more favorably in ranking than those of third parties.
Supporters argue these changes will increase competition, but critics contend that they may instead reduce incentives to innovate and make digital products less seamless for consumers.
Amazon provides a useful example: Amazon Prime succeeds because it bundles fast shipping, streaming video and music, cloud photo storage, and other benefits into a single subscription. Consumers voluntarily choose Prime because they value that integrated experience.
Although the DMA does not prohibit Amazon Prime, its restrictions on how dominant platforms can combine and prioritize their own services raise broader questions about whether future regulations could make such integrated consumer experiences more difficult to maintain.
The Digital Services Act takes an equally expansive approach by requiring major online platforms to assess systemic risks, increase transparency, provide regulators and qualified researchers with access to platform data, and submit to ongoing oversight.
These goals may sound reasonable. But compliance requires armies of lawyers, engineers, auditors, and policy experts. Large technology companies may be able to absorb these costs. Smaller competitors often cannot.
Ironically, regulations intended to curb the power of Big Tech can sometimes reinforce it by creating compliance burdens that startups struggle to meet. Whether the DMA lowers or raises barriers to competition remains the subject of active academic debate, but there is broad agreement that the regulatory obligations are substantial.
But the ripple effects don’t stop there.
Every additional compliance requirement consumes engineering resources that could otherwise be spent improving products, fixing bugs, developing new features, or lowering prices. Consumers rarely see these hidden costs directly, but they experience them through slower innovation, more cumbersome user experiences, and higher prices spread across digital services.
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This should concern Americans regardless of their views about regulating technology companies. There are legitimate debates to be had about privacy, competition, and online safety. But those debates should occur through American democratic institutions, not by default because multinational corporations conclude it’s easier to comply with Europe’s regulations everywhere than to build separate systems.
The question Americans should ask is whether we want the future of the American internet to be shaped through our own democratic process or quietly rewritten, one regulation at a time, in Brussels.
Chloe Anagnos is a visiting fellow at Independent Women.