⚠ A Monopoly This Total Invites InterventionModerate threat

The flip side of a hundred-percent share is that it makes ASML a target for the two forces a monopoly cannot out-engineer: governments and regulators. Because EUV is treated as a strategic national-security asset, ASML's freedom to sell is not fully its own¹ — the Dutch government, under heavy US pressure, forbids it from selling EUV to China, and the rules on what it may ship, and to whom, keep tightening. A monopoly on an essential technology operates at the sufferance of the states that consider it strategic.

There is also a latent antitrust dimension: a sole supplier of an essential input, earning monopoly economics, is the kind of company competition authorities watch, and customers with no alternative occasionally chafe at their dependence. Neither export controls nor antitrust scrutiny has weakened the underlying monopoly — the machines are still irreplaceable — but they cap where and to whom the monopoly can be exercised, and they make ASML a permanent piece on the geopolitical board. The completeness of the monopoly is a commercial fortress and, simultaneously, a standing invitation for the state to reach in.