The big tech companies are expanding their dominance inconspicuously through mergers and acquisitions. Most of these deals escape the scrutiny of the competition authorities, according to an analysis by the Dutch organization SOMO. This is a problem for innovation, diversity and fair competition. We need better merger control.
Key results of the evaluation:
- The big tech companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft) acquired at least 191 companies worldwide between 2019 and 2025: one every eleven days on average.
- The competition authorities only prevented two of these mergers. 184 takeovers were not notified to the European Commission at all.
- Just under 67% of the acquired companies shut down their websites after the takeover and in some cases stopped serving customers altogether.
- Companies in the EU are the second most popular takeover target after the USA. Of the 27 EU companies acquired, many were active in the fields of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and robotics.
- In the new Big Tech M&A Tracker from SOMO, you can view and search the takeovers of tech companies in detail.
The analysis shows serious gaps in merger control. Most tech takeovers are not notified because they do not reach the turnover thresholds. This allows tech companies to take over new, innovative competitors as long as they do not yet generate much turnover. One example of this is the takeover of Instagram by Facebook (now Meta) in 2012. We need to strengthen European and German merger control and improve the recording of takeovers with a high transaction value but low turnover.
This is because correcting problematic takeovers retrospectively is time-consuming. However, it is not impossible either: in the USA, the monopoly proceedings against Meta began on April 14 , with the US competition authority FTC demanding a spin-off of WhatsApp and Instagram. It is good to break up the monopoly position of the big tech companies. But the outcome of the proceedings under Trump is open, even if they originally date back to Trump’s first term in office (more details on the proceedings here).
Graphic created by Alex Mellon for SOMO, April 2025.
