President Donald Trump may run into a sticky situation with the European Union and his Federal Trade Commission chief over Big Tech regulations.
Recommended Stories
- The United Nations is still aiding Hamas
- Pete Hegseth’s war on the Pentagon press corps
- Don't kill the 'one big, beautiful bill,' but do downsize the deficit growth
In February, Trump vowed to hit countries that enact “discriminatory, disproportionate” fines or tariffs against American companies with “responsive actions” to protect U.S. businesses. “American businesses will no longer prop up failed foreign economies through extortive fines and taxes,” he wrote in a memo. Trump called out “fines” and “taxes” “designed to transfer funds to local [European] companies.”
His warning may have been all for naught. In April, the EU handed down almost $800 million total in fines to Meta and Apple.
The fines were under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, a sweeping set of regulations meant to protect European countries from dominant tech companies, so-called “online gatekeepers,” that allegedly control how users access search engines, app stores, and social media. While the EU has said the rules do not specifically target American Big Tech companies, all five major tech companies (Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet, also known as Google), along with ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, are listed as gatekeepers. European policy and business figures have tagged the DMA as a key way of bolstering European, not American, tech startups.
Per Eoghan O’Neill, senior policy officer in the Platforms Policy and Enforcement Directorate of the European Commission, “The Digital Markets Act (DMA) aims to make digital markets fairer and more contestable, and to provide new opportunities for startups and investors in the EU.”
Amusingly, EU antitrust officials see the fines as a mild reprimand compared to previous antitrust fines. EU regulators once fined Apple $2 billion following a dispute with Spotify. Sources told Reuters the bloc wanted to encourage compliance with its rules and avoid a conflict with Trump instead of sanctions.
Unsurprisingly, Meta and Apple aren’t happy. Not only do they plan to appeal the fines, but they’ve also asked the Trump administration for help in resolving the dispute. A Meta lobbyist likened the fine to a tariff that “requir[es] us to offer an inferior service.”
Tech analysts picked up on the language.
“Call it what it really is: tech tariffs,” Patrick Hedger with NetChoice wrote on social media.
Jessica Melugin at the Competitive Enterprise Institute added, “The EU is walking a tightrope on staying strict on its own tech regulations while not provoking the administration in the tariff wars.”
Parts of Trump’s administration agreed with Melugin. The National Security Council said the EU was extorting Apple and Meta and threatening trade and free society. “[They] will not be tolerated by the United States,” NSC spokesman Brian Hughes told Politico.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has also called the DMA a barrier to trade. He said the regulations “disproportionately capture U.S. firms compared to their EU competitors,” making it harder for them to compete in Europe. That increases costs on American businesses, while European corporations avoid a heavier financial burden.
The biggest Trump administration critic of the DMA may be Vice President JD Vance. At February’s Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, he warned European leaders that it would be “a terrible mistake” if the EU continued with DMA.
“The Trump administration is troubled by reports that some foreign governments are considering tightening the screws on U.S. tech companies with international footprints,” Vance said.
He portrayed the heavy-handed rules as unfairly beneficial to companies that already have a footprint in the digital world, particularly if they’ve expanded to artificial intelligence development.
“It would mean paralyzing one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations,” Vance said.
Other parts of the Trump administration likely agree with the EU’s fine.
In the weeks before the fine was announced, EU officials expressed confidence to the Wall Street Journal that common ground could be found on competition policy. This was due to antitrust action the first Trump administration took against Google.
Another EU ally is FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson.
In a memo sent to FTC employees in February, he said, “Investigating Big Tech’s monopoly power and censorship practices is one of my highest priorities.”
Ferguson, however, isn’t 100% sold on the DMA because it’s not tied to activities in Europe. At the Little Tech Competition Summit in April, he said the recent fines against Meta and Apple appear to him to be “a form of taxing American companies.”
He would prefer that the U.S. government address “anticompetitive conduct at home.”
Perhaps that’s why Ferguson’s FTC remains hell-bent on pursuing action against Meta for buying WhatsApp over a decade ago.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) agreed with Ferguson. In the New York Post, Hawley predicted the FTC would restore “competition to digital markets” if it succeeded in its lawsuit against Meta.
He also warned the federal government needed to swat down Big Tech, or else “the corporations will effectively be the government for the nation.”
That prompted free market tech advocates to express skepticism that the Trump administration would back away from the heavy-handed enforcement of regulations.
“They do not seem to have any trouble with the cognitive dissonance between that goal and their continued antitrust grudge match against Big Tech,” Josh Withrow, a technology and innovation fellow at the R Street Institute, told me.
What bothered Withrow was that so-called small-government conservatives now echo the “fundamentally progressive idea that private power is somehow equal to or worse than the danger posed by government power.”
And while it’s true that Big Tech is composed of incredibly large companies, Withrow pointed out that they got that large because of the popularity of their products. “Those same economies of scale are also why private U.S. companies are at the leading edge of revolutionary technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing,” he said.
Another worrying sign, according to Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute, was that Republicans fell for the same trap as Democrats, in which the government can be used to achieve policy goals or go after companies the government disfavors.
“That’s unlikely to stay just in the tech space and means that subsequent administrations would have that power, too,” Huddleston warned. “We should continue the approach that really focuses on the consumer, rather than making these presumptions that big is bad.”
That puts the Big Tech companies in a strange position, with two competing and contradictory factions seeking to win out over the other in the Trump administration.
Melugin said she expects the administration to stay in sync on anti-conservative bias from Big Tech and that antitrust is trickier because the current cases “aren’t about content moderation.”
Given the administration’s promise to defeat China in the artificial intelligence race, “the administration will need so-called Big Tech,” she said.
None of this should be surprising, given the contradictory policies the administration has taken. If Trump truly desires a free market, he would drop the Justice Department and the FTC’s antitrust crusades against Big Tech.
The contradictory moves by the Trump administration have frustrated observers who see the American regulatory action as further proof that antitrust enforcement is moving away from being focused on helping consumers and more toward what government regulators prefer.
“As a result, the consumers may actually end up worse off,” Huddleston said. “They may lose certain features. They may lose certain services. They may have certain security risks.”
That threatens innovation, she warned, specifically when it comes to startup companies that need additional funds to expand or large corporations that want to develop new products.
Unfortunately, Trump is more likely to continue a campaign of chaos that will leave American companies scrambling to catch up rather than innovate.
Taylor Millard is a freelance journalist who lives in Virginia.