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Months before the U.S. military arrested Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, opposition leader María Corina Machado called for what she described as the most ambitious economic transformation in the nation’s history—a sweeping privatization aimed at reversing his policies and what she calls “the disaster this socialist system has wrought.”

Appearing virtually on the Fortune Global Forum stage in Riyadh, Machado, while in hiding from the Maduro regime, unveiled a bold vision to rebuild Venezuela’s shattered economy through large-scale private investment.

“Venezuela will be the single biggest economic opportunity for decades to come in this region,” she told Fortune’s Diane Brady at the forum’s 2025 edition, weeks after winning the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her decades-long fight to restore democracy to Venezuela. “We’re talking about an opportunity, business opportunity, of more than $1.7 trillion. This is unique.” Machado has floated the $1.7 trillion figure before, an estimate produced by her economic advisory team.

Machado painted a stark picture of a nation that has plummeted from prosperity to poverty: “a country that used to be the richest country in our region and the freest country in our region, and that has turned into one of the poorest.” Being under socialist rule for decades, she said, has crippled industry, devastated infrastructure, and triggered an exodus of nearly a third of Venezuela’s population. “Our economy has collapsed. It’s been over 80% down in the last [several] years,” she said. “Our people have been forced to flee just to survive.”

The International Monetary Fund estimated Venezuela’s economy had declined by roughly 75% as of late 2022, also covering its migrant crisis. The left-wing think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research argued shortly afterward that, while this figure was accurate, it discounted the severe economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Venezuela for many years.

The opposition leader described to Brady what she called a “narco-terrorist state” built on repression and corruption, saying that “certainly Venezuela has turned into a safe haven for criminal activities from all over the world.” She accused Maduro and his allies of financing their grip on power through gold smuggling, arms and drug trafficking, and human exploitation.

At the core of Machado’s plan is a rapid and transparent privatization process. She estimates that more than 500 enterprises were “taken by the regime, confiscated, destroyed, but the infrastructure is there.” She pledged strict oversight and rule of law from “day one,” aiming to lure investors back with stability and fiscal incentives. She pledged open markets and an approach that would be “absolutely strict” in terms of rule of law and transparency, reminding Brady that Venezuela is currently in last place in terms of rule of law. To take one example, the World Justice Project recently ranked Venezuela No. 142, out of 142 countries.

She also pointed out that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world and the eighth largest natural gas reserve globally, “but currently our people don’t even have gas even to cook. That’s a disaster.” Bloomberg reported in December 2024 that Venezuelans were turning to firewood and even their own furniture to cook after an explosion at a propane plant wiped out most of the country’s transmission. “The socialist system has rotted,” she said.

Restoring the oil and gas sectors, she added, will demand both foreign capital and the return of Venezuela’s diaspora. “Our human talent, our people, our diaspora … is willing to come back as soon as Venezuela goes to work hard.”

Machado said she would welcome responsible private investment from “all over the world”—including the United States, Europe, China, and the Middle East—provided all projects adhere to transparency and fair competition. Speaking to the forum in Riyadh, she also signaled strong interest in partnerships with Gulf nations.

She called for an international front to expose and freeze assets linked to Maduro’s circle. “We are asking all democratic countries around the world … to have a full disclosure of all the information they have regarding all the crimes Nicolás Maduro and his cronies have committed,” she said.

Despite living in hiding, Machado was resolute about Venezuela’s future. “If the regime finds me, I’ll likely be disappeared,” she said matter-of-factly, betraying a hint of emotion but quickly adding that her own dangers and struggles are no different from that of any Venezuelan who speaks out at this moment. “I want you to know that I am absolutely convinced that we’re moving into a transition that is going to be orderly. Venezuela is a cohesive society, we have no tensions, racial, religious, social, political, and 90% of our country wants the same, to live with dignity, with justice, certainly with freedom, and we want to bring our kids back home.”

CSRC reforms revive fundraising momentum with 115 firms generating US$18.3 billion across mainland China’s exchanges

Initial public offerings (IPOs) in mainland China nearly doubled in 2025 from a year earlier after the securities regulator rolled back curbs on new listings and resumed approvals for pre-profit technology companies, in line with Beijing’s drive to replace imported tech products with home-grown alternatives.

A total of 115 companies raised a combined 128 billion yuan (US$18.3 billion) from IPOs on the Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing exchanges this year, according to Bloomberg data.

That eclipsed the 67.4 billion yuan in 2024, when the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) slowed down approvals of new offerings and tightened the scrutiny of applicants to bolster confidence in the stock market.

Several high-profile offerings followed the regulatory relaxation. Moore Threads Technology and MetaX Integrated Circuits – two Chinese graphics processing unit (GPU) developers seen as challengers to Nvidia – completed first-time stock sales in Shanghai.

The rebound in mainland China IPOs coincided with a listings boom in Hong Kong, where demand was revived by offerings of leading Chinese companies that have dominant positions in their industries.

“We saw a bunch of policies in 2025 that encouraged IPOs, and the pace of new share sales is expected to accelerate in 2026,” said Wang Zhengzhi, an analyst at Guotai Haitong Securities. “Further reforms will be pushed forward and that will boost the inclusiveness of the multilayer capital markets.”

In June, the CSRC reintroduced rules allowing unprofitable tech companies to list on Shanghai’s tech-heavy Star Market, which is modelled after the Nasdaq to support fundraising by companies like chipmakers and biopharmaceutical firms.

That move marked a shift from earlier curbs, when the CSRC stepped up inspections of listing documents and tightened approvals amid investor complaints about poor-quality offerings contributing to stock declines.

China’s A-share IPO market delivered a stronger performance in 2025, with the Shanghai Stock Exchange retaining its position as the world’s fifth-largest bourse by IPO fundraising, according to Deloitte.

Ongoing reforms have laid “a solid foundation” for A-share IPO activity to gain momentum in 2026 and potentially deliver a stronger performance than in 2025, said Tony Huang, Deloitte China’s A-share offering national leader for capital market services.

Huang said companies in sectors prioritised under China’s 15th five-year plan — including artificial intelligence, new energy, high-end manufacturing, commercial aerospace, quantum technology and biomanufacturing — were likely to have an advantage when seeking A-share listings and fundraising.

Deloitte forecast steady growth in both the number of A-share listings and total funds raised in 2026, as overall market liquidity was likely to continue receiving policy support, including measures to encourage long-term capital – such as insurance funds – to enter the market.

The largest IPO in 2025 was Huadian New Energy Group, the wind and solar power producer that raised 18.2 billion yuan in Shanghai, according to Bloomberg data. GPU maker Moore Threads’ 8 billion yuan sale ranked second, followed by silicon wafer maker Xian ESWIN Material Technology with 4.6 billion yuan.

No IPO shares fell below their offer prices on their debut, partly because the regulator capped valuations at 23 times earnings to prevent flops – an unwritten rule in the market.

Harbin Shimada Big Bird Industrial, which makes cleaning robots, surged 13-fold on its first day of trading in November in Shenzhen, making it the best-performing IPO of 2025, Bloomberg data showed. It was followed by Hengdongguang Communication Technology, the optical component maker that surged 919 per cent in its Shenzhen debut, and motor maker Changzhou 3X Motion Technologies with a 693 per cent first trading-day gain.

Tire maker Zhongce Rubber Group was the weakest performer, rising 6.84 per cent in its Shanghai debut in June.

China’s benchmark CSI 300 Index rose nearly 20 per cent last year, with the Star Market rising more than 30 per cent.

Twitter and Pinterest founders launch app as antidote to social media

Biz Stone and Evan Sharp raise new funds for ‘Tangle’ as they assess the ‘devastation’ caused by online excess

Two Silicon Valley veterans behind Twitter and Pinterest have launched a new app that is designed to be an antidote to the “terrible devastation” they say has been caused by social media.

Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, and Evan Sharp, who co-founded online scrapbooking site Pinterest in 2010, have raised $29mn in funding for their new start-up West Co, according to a regulatory filing.

West Co, which the pair founded in 2023, launched its first app, Tangle, in November. It is pitched as a “new kind of social network, designed for intentional living”.

Tangle, which is at present accessible on an invite-only basis, suggests users share personal objectives or “intentions” with their friends, support each other’s goals and “reflect” on how they are achieved.

“It is a tool for meaning that helps people plan with intention, capture the reality of their days, and see the deeper threads that shape their life,” the company said in a recent job advertisement.

West Co, which is headquartered in San Francisco, said on its website that its mission is to “build tools to help people live life more on purpose”. Spark Capital, an early Twitter investor, led West Co’s seed financing round in 2024, according to another job ad.

Stone said the current version of the app — which sends users notifications every morning asking “What’s your intention for today?” — was still an early test and could change before a full public launch.

“It turns out that creating something to help people navigate their lifetime is difficult work,” he told the Financial Times, “but I think it’s worth it.”

In a recent podcast interview, Sharp — who is West Co’s chief executive — described his “eight-year-long obsession” with “really trying to understand what we fundamentally disrupted with the phone and social media so that I could . . . help make that a little bit better”.

“What could I build that might help address just some of the terrible devastation of the human mind and heart that we’ve wrought the last 15 years?” he said.

Stone and Sharp are among several Silicon Valley executives grappling with the side effects of the products and services that they built, even as their companies’ success made them wealthy.

Sir Jonathan Ive, the former Apple designer who helped birth the iPhone, has described his project to develop an AI-based consumer device with OpenAI as a response to the “unintended consequences” of the smartphone. Sharp spent two years working at LoveFrom, Ive’s design firm, before launching West Co.

Tangle is Stone’s latest attempt to capitalise on his earlier success. He is also a co-founder of Medium, an online publishing platform, and Jelly, a question-and-answer app that was later acquired by Pinterest. He launched investment firm Future Positive in 2019 and at present serves on the board of Mastodon, another social networking group.

After leaving Twitter in 2021, Stone clashed with Elon Musk after the Tesla and SpaceX chief acquired the company, which the billionaire has now renamed X. Musk is “not a serious person”, Stone said in a post in December 2022, describing the changes Musk made to the service as “heartbreaking”.

Several of West Co’s founding team previously worked at Twitter and Pinterest. Another early employee, Reverend Sue Phillips, a former Unitarian Universalist church minister turned tech company adviser, now serves as the start-up’s “head of wise AI and ancient technologist”, according to her LinkedIn profile.

- I view the current level of the funds rate as still a little restrictive

- I see a decent chance that we will end the year with inflation that is close to 2% on a run-rate basis, as tariff-related price adjustments will likely be completed

- While the labor market is clearly bending, it is not breaking; I see the broad deceleration in the labor market as stemming from both supply and demand factors

- Baseline outlook for the economy is pretty benign

- Fed could cut rates again later this year if the economy stays benign

An account on prediction market Polymarket drew attention on social media for correctly building up a position betting Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro would be out, making a return of 1,242% in just four days.

The account, created in December 2025, spent a total of $32,537 over the past four days betting that Maduro would be out by Jan. 31. As President Donald Trump confirmed the U.S. had captured Maduro early Saturday morning, the account made profits of $404,222, or a 1,242% return. It’s unclear who’s behind the account, or if the person has other accounts or positions. The account is also currently betting that the U.S. will invade Venezuela and Trump will invoke War Powers against Venezuela by the end of this month.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets in the U.S., generally forbids contracts related to events such as war, terrorism and assassination, which are contrary to the public interest. Polymarket’s global platform, where the account made its bets, is not open to U.S. users and therefore not subject to U.S. regulations. Polymarket has launched a separate platform for U.S. users.

Kalshi also offers bets on when Maduro would be leaving office, though there’s currently no bet on potential U.S. invasion of Venezuela.

Nike CEO Elliott Hill and directors Tim Cook and Robert Swan together spent nearly $4.45 million last month to buy shares of the firm's common stock.

Nike Inc. insiders are putting their personal money at risk in a move that typically shows they have confidence in the future of the company and the direction it is headed.

Nike’s president and chief executive officer Elliott Hill on Monday spent $1 million to acquire 16,388 shares of the company’s Class B Common stock at $61.10 per share, according to a regulatory filing — a Form 4 — with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday. The acquisition appears to represent his first purchase of Nike stock since becoming CEO, according to Guggenheim analyst Simeon Siegel.

He’s not the only Nike insider buying the firm’s common stock. Apple Inc. CEO and Nike director Tim Cook on Dec. 22 purchased 50,000 shares at $58.97, spending nearly $2.95 million in the process. And Andreessen Horowitz’s growth investing team operating partner and Nike director Robert Swan acquired 8,691 shares at $57.54, also on Dec. 22, at a total cost of $500,080.

“Whether intended as investment or signal, it is encouraging to see management and the board putting their money where their mouth is,” the analyst said.

Hill took on the role of president and CEO in October 2024. Early indications when the Swoosh posted third quarter results in March 2025 were that his “Win Now” strategy — developed December 2024 — was showing some green shoots. In subsequent quarters, those green shoots appeared to continue to see growth. By June 2025, when Nike reported fourth quarter results, Hill said he expected business results to improve.

And when Nike reported first quarter earnings results in September, it was clear that Nike Running is back on the upswing and that the brand’s running rivals might have something to worry about. The early perception of a comeback was Nike’s introduction of new products, among them a revamped Vomero line that saw Vomero 18, launched at the end of February 2025, surpass $100 million in sales. Those sales also garnered positive support from some specialty retailers.

Hill also said in September that the company realigned 8,000 of its employees to Sport Offense, a new initiative that aligns its three brands — Nike, Jordan and Converse — “into more nimble-focused teams by sport.” It’s another layer in the “Win Now” initiative that allows each brand to craft its own identity that best suits the different consumers that they each serve. That was evident when the sportswear and athletic shoe brand last fall reconfigured its Fifth Avenue flagship store at 52nd Street, showcasing its “House of Innovation” concept with a sport-focused makeover.

Other changes came last month when the senior leadership team was rejiggered, moves that Hill said in an open letter to staff that spoke about giving “sales and Nike Direct an even stronger voice in how we set strategy and invest,” as well as removing some “layers” so Nike can be “closer to athletes and the marketplace.”

On the way out is Craig Williams, the former president of the Jordan Brand, whose executive vice president and chief commercial officer role was eliminated. Williams will stay on as a non-executive employee through April 6, 2026. Also out is chief technology officer Dr. Muge Dogan. Technology now falls under the leadership of Venkatesh Alagirisamy, who was chief supply office and became chief operating office on Dec. 8. He reports to Hill. In addition, the leaders of Nike’s four geographies are now part of the senior leadership team that reports to Hill, while Nike’s executive vice president and CFO Matt Friend took on oversight of Swoosh’s global sale and Nike Direct teams.

And while second quarter results last month were better than Wall Street’s consensus, it showed there’s more work to be done at its Converse brand and Greater China operations. That’s not necessarily a worry for Wall Street, as many analysts have noted that the two areas Nike focused on first — running and North America — continue to show progress. They recognize that a turnaround is underway, even if more time — and a heavier lift — is needed to fix the Greater China and Converse businesses.

Siegel said there’s progress in the turnaround playbook, one that echos similar challenges in the sportswear brand’s 2015 to 2018 run-in with competitor Adidas. And he said that while sales in Greater China missed Wall Street’s expectations, due in part to higher obsolescence reserves, the company’s quarterly report filed with the SEC showed that the region saw a flat ASP (average selling price) for footwear and a “+6 percent” for apparel, citing lower markdowns across both. Siegel said that suggested perhaps a “healthier quarter than otherwise observed” due to the reserve.

Philadelphia Fed President Anna Paulson said that the Federal Reserve may be able to cut interest rates further if inflation cools—but suggested that any additional reductions might not be coming right away.

Paulson, entering her first year as a voting member of the Fed’s policy committee, said in a speech in Philadelphia Saturday that she is cautiously optimistic price increases may ease in the months ahead. She said that at 3.5% to 3.75%, the Fed’s interest-rate target is still “a little restrictive,” meaning it is high enough to lean against inflation, which could eventually allow further cuts.

If inflation abates and the economy remains on track otherwise, “some modest further adjustments to the funds rate would likely be appropriate later in the year,” Paulson said, according to a published text of her remarks.

Paulson said in the speech that she supported the three quarter-point rate cuts that the Fed voted through during the fall, as officials shifted their attention to cushioning a weaker labor market. Policymakers have gotten “divergent signals” about the job market’s health that, taken together, suggest it is bending but not breaking, Paulson said, adding that she is waiting for clarity from additional data. Her comments suggested she may want to see more evidence about how the economy evolves in the months ahead before backing further policy adjustments.

Minutes of the Fed’s December meeting recorded that some officials expressed hesitance about additional cuts in the near future, without identifying them by name. Bets in interest-rate futures markets show that so far, traders broadly expect the Fed to hold rates steady at its next meeting later this month.

The December jobs report, due Friday, could tilt the Fed’s calculus if it shows that the labor market worsened significantly versus November, when unemployment ticked up to 4.6%.

President Trump, who has demanded that the Fed bring rates lower, is deep into a selection process to choose a successor to Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose term at the Fed’s helm expires in May. Any Fed chair must win the majority support of the central bank’s 12-member policy committee in order to adjust interest rates.

Country has largest population of refugees from Syria in Europe, including medical professionals

German health associations have warned that rising anti-Syrian rhetoric risks worsening staff shortages in hospitals, clinics and care homes in the EU’s largest nation.

Syrians are the largest group of foreign doctors working in Germany, with 16 per cent coming from the war-ravaged country, according to the German Medical Association.

But the toppling of former president Bashar al-Assad in 2024 has triggered a fraught political debate over their continued presence in Germany, which is home to Europe’s largest Syrian population.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who is under pressure from the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) to take a tougher stance on immigration, said in November that “there were no reasons” for Syrians to continue to be granted asylum in Germany. “There is no civil war anymore,” he added.

Merz said he hoped that many Syrians would return voluntarily to help rebuild their country, but he also left the door open to deportations.

That has alarmed health associations, including the German Medical Association, which told the Financial Times that “many clinics would experience serious bottlenecks” without Syrian doctors.

There is already a trend of doctors leaving the country, with 2,197 people emigrating in 2024, according to the association’s data. Of those, 41 per cent were non-German citizens.

The care sector faces some of the most acute skilled-worker shortages and will need to recruit at least 280,000 additional staff by 2049.

Isabell Halletz, managing director of the Employers’ Association for Nursing Care, said an exodus of Syrians from the sector would “be a blow to securing skilled workers in the future”.

With Germany’s population ageing, she warned that losing Syrian workers would lead to people in need being neglected. “We assume that people would then be left without care or would have to wait for several weeks or months.”

Germany became Europe’s largest host of people fleeing Syria after then chancellor Angela Merkel opened the door to about 1mn asylum seekers in 2015. Today, about 972,000 Syrian nationals live in the country, of whom roughly 712,000 are asylum seekers, according to the latest official figures from 2023.

Their presence has helped fuel rising support for the anti-immigrant AfD, which came second in the 2025 parliamentary elections with a record 21 per cent of the vote. The party has seized upon deadly knife attacks carried out by migrants, including Syrians, and has criticised the high share of refugees claiming benefits.

About 55 per cent of the Syrian nationals living in Germany received benefits in 2024 — down from more than 80 per cent in 2018. As of May, about 300,000 Syrians were actively employed.

Of these, more than 80,000 Syrians work in sectors where the country faces shortages as it grapples with an ageing population and a shrinking workforce, according to the Cologne-based German Economic Institute (IW). The proportion of people aged over 67 is projected to reach one in four by 2035.

Syrians’ contribution to “society as a whole” is a “crucial” part of the demographic challenges, said Lydia Malin, a senior economist at IW. Syrians work in service sectors that will be sorely needed in future “to care for our parents or look after our children”, she said.

Malin said about a third of Germany’s 1mn Syrians were children at school, adding: “If we send all the women and minors we have in the country back home now because they cannot yet provide for themselves, then we will lose exactly the potential that we will need in 10 or 15 years.”

The bottlenecks extend beyond healthcare. Among those training to work in skilled trades, such as builders, electricians and cleaners, Syrian workers are the biggest group without a German passport, making up 17 per cent, according to data provided by the German Confederation of Skilled Crafts and Small Businesses (ZDH).

“Given the demographic trend of fewer young people entering the workforce each year, this potential is more important than ever for the skilled trades,” said ZDH’s managing director, Karl-Sebastian Schulte.

The latest debate over the future of Syrians in Germany was prompted by foreign minister Johann Wadephul’s visit to Syria in October. While touring Harasta, a town near Damascus, he said that “hardly anyone can live a dignified life here”, casting doubt on the prospect of refugees returning.

The comments caused unease within Merz’s Christian Democrats, of which Wadephul is a member, as the party was seeking a tougher stance on migration to fend off the AfD. The chancellor ultimately chose to publicly contradict his own minister, insisting that there were no reasons for Syrians not to return home.

In December, Germany deported a convicted Syrian criminal for the first time since Syria’s civil war began in 2011, following a new agreement with Syria’s transitional government to allow the removal of high-risk offenders.

According to official data, some 88 per cent of Syrian refugees have a humanitarian residence permit that grants them protected status. Thomas Oberhäuser, chair of the German Bar Association’s committee on migration law, said they could not easily be deported until safe return conditions were met.

“It is upsetting because so many people who are integrated well . . . are being told ‘get out’, even though practically it doesn’t work that way,” Oberhäuser said. “Legally it is super-complicated and from an integration policy standpoint it is nonsense.”

Merz, meanwhile, has softened his stance, saying in December that “we need immigration [for the] whole medical sector, nursing sector and other areas”. But, he stressed, “those who want to live in our country must abide by the rules. And if they don’t, they must leave.”

Still, the tone of the political debate has made some highly skilled Syrians think twice about staying in Germany.

Leena Albarazi, a GP in the small Bavarian town of Pfarrkirchen, fled Damascus in 2014. She has a German passport and feels “at home” in the country. But she would still consider leaving “soon” if the situation “escalated even more”, she said.

“I don’t want my daughter, who was born here and now only knows Germany, to experience [discrimination] at school or in kindergarten,” she said.

Many of her colleagues had already moved or were planning to do so, she said, “either back to Syria, or simply elsewhere to Canada or Saudi Arabia”.

Zakaria Hawoot, a senior neurologist and chair of the Syrian German Medical Association, said: “We are now fighting to make Germany better . . . But there is a limit.

“If there comes a time where we can’t change things anymore, then we could use our strength to do something else in other countries.”

EU readies tougher tech enforcement in 2026 as Trump warns of retaliation

Challenges to Google, Meta, Apple and X will test Brussels’ willingness to stick with digital rule book

The EU is intensifying its challenge to Google, Meta, Apple and Elon Musk’s X in 2026, in regulatory moves that are expected to lead to renewed clashes with US big tech groups and President Donald Trump.

According to Brussels officials and policymakers, the European Commission is switching focus to enforcing an expansive digital rule book after years of negotiating landmark legislation to take on the world’s biggest technology groups.

That effort will face political challenges over the coming year. The Trump administration has demanded changes to the bloc’s tech rules and threatened to impose tariffs in retaliation for EU actions against Silicon Valley groups.

The EU faces a difficult balancing act, since it wants to enforce its digital rules without triggering a transatlantic trade war or provoking the US president into siding with Russia on Ukraine.

“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],” the EU’s competition chief Teresa Ribera told the Financial Times.

The approach requires sticking with its existing laws, including the Digital Markets Act, aimed at opening powerful “online gatekeepers” to rivals, and the Digital Services Act, which forces internet companies to better police illegal content.

Officials working on the implementation of this legislation said the focus had always been behind-the-scenes work to ensure compliance over headline-grabbing sanctions.

After being hit by fines in the spring, both Apple and Meta have made changes to their business models to accommodate the EU’s concerns.

The bloc has begun probing new areas of potential enforcement. In December, Brussels launched an investigation into whether Meta was preventing rival AI providers from accessing WhatsApp, and Google’s use of online content for AI models. Regulators also launched investigations to ensure enough competition in the cloud-computing sector.

“You go ahead in that measured, professional way, and you’re just a little bit more quiet perhaps than you otherwise would be because there’s really no pay-off to making a lot of announcements,” said Fiona Scott Morton, an antitrust scholar at Yale University.

But she added that when it came to enforcing its digital rules, “there is pay-off to moving forward and achieving outcomes that benefit the European people and business users”.

However, some tech cases are likely to draw widespread attention.

The EU’s executive arm will have to decide how much further to push its action against Google over allegedly favouring its own services and products in search results, including whether to issue big fines against the search engine’s parent company Alphabet.

This year, enforcing the DSA could prove to be even more of a minefield.

The focus so far has been on protecting minors online and the safety of online marketplaces such as Temu and Shein and tackling financial fraud online — issues that have agreement on both sides of the Atlantic. That was in part a strategic choice, European officials said, given the geopolitical sensitivities over the DSA.

But in December, the commission fined Elon Musk’s X €120mn over violations to transparency rules under the law, leading to a flurry of anti-European statements from US government officials and calls from Musk to “abolish the EU”.

The same month, the US instituted a visa ban against former EU commissioner Thierry Breton and four other people over what it said was “censorship” and coercion of American social media platforms.

Washington said Breton was targeted as the mastermind of the DSA and for telling Musk that X needed to comply with rules on illegal content. 

Secretary of state Marco Rubio said it was taking steps to “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.”

Meanwhile, European lawmakers and civil society are pushing Brussels to step up work on more sensitive investigations, such as into X’s attempts to counter the spread of illegal content and TikTok’s potential role in electoral interference.

Lawyers and officials also argue the bloc could go much further to tackle competition in artificial intelligence.

But Damien Geradin, an antitrust lawyer who has represented companies in probes against Google and others, said: “The enforcement of EU digital regulations has been made more challenging by the aggressive stance taken by the US administration.”

Geopolitical considerations have emboldened Big Tech to fight back with a fierce lobbying effort in Europe and the US.

Google said the EU’s investigation into its AI models “risks stifling innovation in a market that is more competitive than ever”.

Apple has demanded that Brussels scrap its DMA altogether, while Meta has said the commission tries “to handicap successful American business while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards”.

Caving to internal or external pressure on enforcement would be a “disaster” for the European economy, said Mario Marinello, a fellow at the Brussels-based think-tank Bruegel. “If you want competitiveness, you need strong competition enforcement.”

Even the current enforcement of digital rules was “too little, too late,” said Alexandra Geese, a European lawmaker who sits with the Greens in the European parliament.

“There is an attack on our democracy going on, led by the tech oligarchs on social media, and we’re not really defending ourselves.”