The European Commission’s merger control regime has caught less than 5% of transactions by large US tech companies over the past six years, including potential killer acquisitions, according to the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations.
The organisation, known as SOMO, revealed today that out of 191 successful acquisitions between 2019 and 2025 by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft, only seven were notified to the EU agency.
128 of the 191 companies have since shuttered their websites, SOMO noted. That number includes websites that went offline, announced closure and redirected users to the acquirer’s website.
This “suggests that they may have been killed by the acquiring company or were eliminated or restricted before reaching their full potential,” the group said.
Out of 27 European companies taken over during the time period, 16 closed down their websites post-acquisition, the NGO’s research found.
This raises “concerns about how American Big Tech stifles innovation in Europe,” SOMO claimed. Antitrust agencies must pay closer attention to the criteria in merger reviews, the NGO added – for instance, looking to boost diversity in the innovation space.
SOMO is an independent non-profit research and network organisation that focuses on investigating the impacts of corporate power. The research is also part of the global “Digital Merger Watch” initiative, where several civil society organisations plan to scrutinise Big Tech’s alleged efforts to reinforce their dominance through acquisitions.
In its research published today, the group noted that “important mergers” potentially evade scrutiny because they fall below merger notification thresholds, as innovative startups usually don’t generate significant revenues in their early years.
Key deals flagged by SOMO as potential killer acquisitions included Amazon’s acquisition of bluDiagnostics and its flagship fertility tracking project in 2020, which the company shut down last year.
Another was Google’s takeover of cloud migration company StratoZone in 2020, also shut down last year, and Meta’s acquisition of virtual and augmented reality company Ready at Dawn, which also closed down in 2024.
Competition authorities, including the European Commission, should pursue “more fine-tuned tools” such as below-threshold merger call-in powers to plug this gap, the NGO urged.
The new European Commission has committed to enhancing the bloc’s competitiveness, which includes a mandate to “modernise” its competition policy to support innovation and tackle so-called killer acquisitions, among other things.
Competition commissioner Teresa Ribera has repeatedly signaled that finding a solution to the perceived enforcement gap around below-threshold mergers is high on her list of priorities.
The issue was thrust into the spotlight after the European Court of Justice dealt a blow to the commission’s merger review powers last year, ruling the agency couldn’t rely on a revised interpretation of Article 22 of the EU merger regulations to review killer acquisitions that didn’t require notification in Brussels or to national competition authorities.
The agency has since been encouraging national competition agencies to adopt call-in powers, which would allow them to refer possibly problematic deals to the commission.
A commission spokesperson told GCR the agency will “continue to actively monitor transactions to identify potential killer acquisitions and alert Member States of those, so that they can either review them at national level or refer them to the Commission.”
Close cooperation with national agencies is planned to ensure such deals do not “fall through the net,” they added.
Meanwhile, innovation will be one of the critical areas of the commission’s focus in the upcoming review of the EU Merger Guidelines, the spokesperson said.
They added the review aims to “give more clarity on how the Commission assesses the impact on competition of potential killer acquisitions and other transactions that might harm innovation.”
Çağrı Çavuş, a competition policy researcher at SOMO, who co-conducted the analysis, told GCR that the European Commission needs call-in powers of its own, as the current patchwork referral system may fail to catch all potentially problematic transactions.
Meanwhile, a “one-stop-shop” system for significant global deals, without having to go through the potential referral process, would be preferable for the EU’s internal market, he added.
SOMO analysis found that Google’s planned $32 billion acquisition of software company Wiz, announced last month, appears to fall below EU turnover thresholds.
“That EU merger control may fail to capture Google’s largest acquisition to date raises serious concerns about whether current thresholds are fit for addressing market power in the digital economy,” the NGO said.
Pointing to a media report that Google’s previously unsuccessful bid for Wiz was “accelerated” by the re-election of US President Donald Trump, SOMO researcher Çavuş noted there is still a question mark around the EU’s response to potential pressure from Trump to soften enforcement against US tech companies.
“It’s all up to the posture of the European Commission, how they are going to want to deal with all of these political developments,” Çavuş said. “Are they going to abide by every rule that’s imposed by Trump on them or are they going to stand up and protect the sovereignty of the European Union?”
The commission previously investigated Amazon’s planned takeover of iRobot, which was abandoned by the parties in early 2024 after the agency reportedly signalled it was planning to block the deal.
David Zapolsky, Amazon senior vice president and general counsel, said in a statement at the time that the prohibition would slow innovation and lead to less competitive prices for consumers, while a trade association linked to Amazon claimed a block would “make no sense” if the aim was to increase competition in the home robotics sector.
Microsoft and Amazon declined to comment. Apple, Meta and Google were contacted for comment.
