Tech giants up ante by withholding products from EU

Aiming to fight what they see as vague and overly burdensome regulation by the European Union, U.S. tech giants are playing one of the strongest cards they have: withholding their products. Until now, the U.S. tech giants have dominated the global digital economy by serving (almost) everyone, accepting divergent regional laws as the cost of doing business. But Meta has decided not to release a new multimodal AI model and related products in the EU. The move follows a similar decision by Apple to withhold its new Apple Intelligence features from Europe. If companies like Apple and Meta keep withholding products and services from the EU and local alternatives step in to fill the gap, the whole global online market could change.