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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Brussels is reassessing its investigations of tech groups including Apple, Meta and Google, just as the US companies urge president-elect Donald Trump to intervene against what they characterise as overzealous EU enforcement.

The review, which could lead to the European Commission scaling back or changing the remit of the probes, will cover all cases launched since March last year under the EU’s digital markets regulations, according to two officials briefed on the move.

It comes as the Brussels body begins a new five-year term amid mounting pressure over its handling of the landmark cases and as Trump prepares to return to the White House next week.

“It’s going to be a whole new ballgame with these tech oligarchs so close to Trump and using that to pressurise us,” said a senior EU diplomat briefed on the review. “So much is up in the air right now.”

All decisions and potential fines will be paused while the review is completed, but technical work on the cases will continue, the officials said.

While some of the investigations under review are at an early stage, others are more advanced. Charges in a probe into Google’s alleged favouring of its app store had been expected last year.

Two other EU officials said Brussels regulators were now waiting for political direction to take final decisions on the Google, Apple and Meta cases.

The review comes as EU lawmakers call for the commission to hold its nerve against US pressure, while Silicon Valley chiefs hail Trump’s return as the start of an era of lighter tech regulation.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, on Friday called on the president-elect to stop Brussels fining US tech companies, complaining that EU regulators had forced them to pay “more than $30bn” in penalties over the past 20 years. 

Zuckerberg, who recently announced plans to abolish fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram — potentially running foul of EU rules — said he was confident the incoming Trump administration wanted to defend American interests abroad.

The implications of Trump’s presidency were a factor in the review, one of the officials said, while insisting his victory had not triggered it.

The commission said it remained “fully committed to the effective enforcement” of its rules. The ongoing cases were “not yet ready at technical level”, a commission spokesperson said, arguing that such investigations took time because of their complexity, novelty and the “need to ensure that commission decisions are legally robust”.

When asked about the FT’s report on Tuesday, the spokesperson said: “There is no such review taking place . . . What we do have are upcoming meetings to assess the general readiness of an investigation. No decision can be taken yet on any of these cases.”

Before Trump’s victory, EU regulators had been pursuing aggressive action against the world’s biggest tech groups, passing a clutch of reforms aimed at opening markets and setting a regulatory framework for Big Tech.

Under the Digital Markets Act, a law seeking to curb the market abuse of big platforms, Brussels launched investigations last March into Apple, Google and Meta.

The commission has also come under pressure to use the full powers of the Digital Services Act, a set of rules aimed at policing content online, to curb the growing influence of tech billionaire Elon Musk in European affairs. 

In addition to the similar investigation of Google’s owner Alphabet, the commission has been looking at whether Apple favoured its own app store, as well as Facebook owner Meta’s use of personal data for advertisements.

Brussels is also consulting Apple’s rivals on the tech group’s proposals to make its iOS operating system compatible with connected devices.

Denmark’s Margrethe Vestager and France’s Thierry Breton, both of whom took a tough line against US tech companies, stepped down from the commission in November.

“Priorities may be shifting,” said one. “The [digital rules] come from the previous commission.”

The commission’s chief spokesperson said on Tuesday: “There may be a political reality [in the US] that puts pressure on the technical work . . . we will be looking and assessing on the basis of concrete measures and actions from the new [Trump] administration.”

EU lawmakers have called for regulators to hold firm. Stephanie Yon-Courtin, an MEP who was involved in drafting the tech rules, said EU probes could not be sacrificed to avoid diplomatic fallout.

In a letter to Ursula von der Leyen, the commission president, Yon-Courtin said the DMA “cannot be taken hostage”.

She added: “Please reassure me that your cabinet and yourself are fully supporting the effective implementation of the DMA, without further delay.”

“The Skateboarding Ethic and the Spirit of Anti-Capitalism.” That was the title of an unusual paper presented at the annual meeting of American economists this year. The title was clearly a reference to a famous 1905 book by German sociologist and economist Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. And I really wanted to know what this economist was going to argue, and, even more, who he was.

This year’s economics conference was spread out across hotels around San Francisco’s Union Square. On the first day of the conference, it was raining hard, and I ran from my hotel to another one down the street to see this paper be presented.

Sopping wet, I entered a small, basement conference room before the presentations began. “Is this where the skateboarding paper is being presented?” I asked the room.

Sure enough, a Gen Xer with baggy blue jeans, Vans skate shoes, and a tweed blazer with elbow pads — the only fashion item that screamed “I’m an academic” — stood up and turned around. “Yes, I’m presenting the skateboarding paper here,” he said.

This tweed-jacketed, Vans-wearing man was Thomas Kemp. He’s an economist at The University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. Kemp says he’s been skateboarding for 40 years, and he continues to skate every day he can (it gets harder to skate during Wisconsin’s winters, so Kemp says he snow skates as well).

For a long time, Kemp published pretty standard economic papers. Papers with titles like, “The Impact of Water Clarity on Home Prices in Northwestern Wisconsin” and “Estimation of product price elasticity of demand.”

“When I was a graduate student, I was actually going to write about skateboarding, but I was told ‘that’s not a good idea,’” Kemp says. But Kemp is more established now. In fact, he’s the chair of his economics department, so he’s more willing to ollie onto the topics he’s the most passionate about.

Kemp’s transformation began a few years back, when he discovered the burgeoning academic literature on skateboarding. “I was just blown away, like, ‘Wow, people are doing academic work on skateboarding,’” Kemp says. And that’s when he did his 180 kickflip.

“ I literally dropped everything else I was working on and started writing papers on skateboarding,” Kemp says.

The Value of Skateparks

Kemp has now published a series of economic papers about skateboarding. One paper, recently published in The Journal of Economic Analysis, is titled “Shred Central: Estimating the user benefits associated with large public skateparks.” Kemp estimated the consumer benefits of the Lauridsen Skatepark in Des Moines, Iowa. At 88,000 square feet, it’s the largest skatepark in the United States.

One of the issues with the economics of skateparks is they’re generally free to use, which makes it difficult to figure out how much they’re actually worth. This is a common problem for public goods, like parks, beaches, rec centers, and so on. Determining the value of a skatepark is important to figure out whether, for example, communities should build more skateparks, and how big and tricked-out those skateparks should be. Despite the popularity of the sport — estimates suggest there may be as many as 9 million skateboarders in the US — “public resources devoted to skateboarding lag far beyond other leisure activities such as softball, tennis, or soccer,” Kemp writes.

Kemp argues that the distance skaters (and BMXers, roller bladers, and other recreationists) are willing to travel to go to the skatepark provides a good way to estimate the value of it. Traveling requires time and money, so the distance users are willing to travel provides an indication of how much they think a skatepark is worth.

In “Shred Central,” Kemp surveyed skateboarders at Lauridsen Skatepark, and found they “will travel great distances at significant cost to ride a park of high perceived quality.” Crunching numbers on use of the park and travel distance, Kemp estimates that the user benefits of this skatepark are “$61 per user per day and roughly $488,000 annually.” This high estimate for the value of the skatepark suggests that there’s a shortage of high-quality skateparks around the country and that community leaders should build more of them. Rad!

“The Skateboarding Ethic and the Spirit of Anti-Capitalism”

In his 1905 book, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argued that Protestant Christianity, especially Calvinism, promoted ethics, like thrift and hard work, that helped nurture the birth of capitalism and rapid economic growth in Northern Europe.

Like Protestants, skateboarders, Kemp argues, have their own set of ethics that can affect their economic lives. And, in Kemp’s view, these ethics can come into conflict with capitalism. For example, skateboarders are known to skate on private property and in front of businesses in search of cool, skateable features. It’s one reason why community leaders have been building skateparks: to encourage skaters to skate in sanctioned areas that are less disruptive to business.

Kemp sees a similar process in history with stickball and baseball. During his presentation, Kemp showed a picture of baseball legend Willie Mays playing stickball in the street when he was young. Like with skateboarding, Kemp says, many leaders saw stickball as a nuisance that disrupted commerce. Kids would shut down streets and disrupt traffic to play the game. They would hit balls and dent cars and break windows. This “irritation to commerce,” Kemp suggests, inspired communities to start building baseball diamonds in community parks and institutionalize the game into more organized and less disruptive baseball leagues.

Willie Mays playing stick ball with Harlem kids.

Bettmann/Getty Images

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“The drive towards creating skateparks appears to me to be on a similar trajectory to what we saw with stickball into baseball,” he says. “That said, we’re now 50-plus years into skateboarding history, and so far, skateboarding seems to be relatively immune from that institutionalization. It’s just as common to see kids skateboarding out in the streets as it is in a skatepark, perhaps even more so.”

Kemp was the last person to present a paper during this particular conference session. The paper presented before him was much less fun, highlighting physical and mental health problems plaguing our society, including the rise of depression, anxiety, and deaths of despair. The author blamed our economic and health systems, which “prioritizes profits over people’s health,” for making these problems worse.

In important ways, skateboarding is a product of capitalism. For decades, for-profit companies have developed and manufactured better skate decks, trucks, and wheels. They’ve marketed the sport. They’ve popularized it. They’ve made it more accessible. Kemp acknowledges that. But he also sees ethics within the culture of skateboarding that can help people overcome the challenges they may face in our capitalist society.

The skateboarding ethic, Kemp says, is “an ethic of resiliency. I fall, I get up, I do it again.” It’s an ethic of “self-betterment. The skateboarder is always trying to do another trick. They’re trying to do the trick better with more style. They’re trying to do it in different places. They’re comparing themselves to their past selves and not necessarily other skateboarders.” And it’s an ethic that isn’t really concerned with competition with others. Skateboarding, he says, is a non-zero sum game. “In other words, if I do the trick, it doesn’t matter that the other skateboarder didn’t do the trick. I’m not in competition with them. I don’t win, they lose, or I lose, they win. No, we’re all winning — hopefully — compared to our previous selves.”

Skateboarding, Kemp suggests, can help us become more resilient. It can help us build more pride in ourselves. It can help us fight isolation and build community. And it can help us exercise, alleviate stress, find joy, and escape the 9-5 grind.

“Skateboarding has something to show us about living life in these challenging times that we find ourselves in,” Kemp says.

Kemp’s presentation, appropriately, took place in San Francisco, which is widely recognized as one of the best and most hardcore skateboarding cities in the world. Skaters here are known to “bomb” hills like daredevils, reaching high speeds and doing incredible tricks. And the city has really come to embrace skateboarding. For example, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art currently has a skateboarding exhibit called “Unity Through Skateboarding” (which, apparently, my son and wife really enjoyed while I was attending this conference).

“San Francisco is legendary,” Kemp said. “Of course, this is a work trip. But, hopefully, I’ll get some skating in while I’m here.”