Representatives of American tech companies have more influence with policymakers in Brussels than European firms and also invest more money in political influence.
This emerges from an analysis by the Financial Times. Google, Apple and Amazon each have more meetings with officials from the European Parliament and the European Commission than any individual European company, the analysis shows.
They also turn out to be among the big spenders, spending millions a year on lobbying activities. Amazon and Meta are at the top at close to €10 million, followed by Apple with €8 million, just above Microsoft, which spent €7 million. Google spent €4.5 million on political influence.
The American companies use lobbying as a way to influence political decision-making. The reasoning: the more you invest in contact and communication, the greater the influence. They are, for example, trying to influence decision-making around the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, as well as privacy and AI legislation.
An analysis of the data by Emerce showed that Big Tech is clearly playing on two boards with more effort invested in contact with elected representatives than with policymakers in the individual departments.
According to an Emerce analysis of Commission meetings between 2025 and September 2026, American companies secure more than twice as many meetings per registered company as European ones: 5.5 compared with 2.4. They account for 9% of the companies, but are responsible for 19% of the meetings. Without American groups with a European registered address, such as Google, Amazon and Meta, the difference is smaller: 1.6 times as many. This calculation did not look at contact with MEPs, only at Commission–meetings.
The American companies with the most meetings are Apple, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, NVIDIA, JPMorgan Chase and Anthropic. The EU companies with the most meetings are Airbus, Volkswagen, Total and BMW.
A source that combines Commission meetings and encounters with MEPs is the website EU Integrity Watch.
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