President Donald Trump said Friday the United States will open a formal investigation into the European Union’s trade practices after the bloc fined Google 890 million euros, or $1 billion, for alleged violations of digital antitrust rules. The move points straight at the machinery of power: governments and regulators on one side, giant corporations on the other, with ordinary people left to absorb the fallout when the titans start swinging.
Trump said the probe would likely lead to a substantial tariff on the 27-member bloc and that the penalties against Google and other U.S. tech companies would be entirely reversed. He framed the EU’s fines as an attack on American companies and the American taxpayer, writing in a lengthy social media post that the United States of America is not a piggybank for Europe. That’s the language of empire and counter-empire, with workers and consumers treated like collateral in a fight over who gets to extract more.
Who Holds the Levers
The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, said Wednesday that the fine against Google came from alleged noncompliance with the bloc’s Digital Markets Act. The commission said Google set up Google Play and its search engine to steer consumers toward its own services and apps at the expense of competitors. Trump said the latest penalty was issued without explanation and warned that the EU’s behavior is not going to continue during the Trump administration.
Trump said the United States will immediately start an investigation under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which permits tariffs in response to practices found to unfairly burden U.S. commerce. The Trump administration has launched multiple probes using that tariff authority. Hours earlier, it imposed new duties between 10% and 12.5% on goods from more than 80 countries, including those in the EU, over alleged forced labor issues. The state’s favorite tool remains the same: tariffs, fines, investigations, and the threat of economic punishment dressed up as order.
By Friday afternoon, a lawsuit challenging those tariffs had already been filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade. The suit, brought by the Liberty Justice Center on behalf of two small businesses, argues the federal government is improperly using Section 301 to effectively reinstate Trump’s 2025 liberation day tariffs, which the Supreme Court struck down earlier this year. Even the legal machinery is just another arena where smaller players try to survive the decisions of larger ones.
Who Pays When Giants Fight
The EU’s billion-dollar fine against Google was the latest major crackdown on Big Tech by Brussels, which has led the world in reining in some of the world’s largest companies from Silicon Valley to Beijing. Trump has lashed out at the 27-nation bloc’s digital regulations in a broader campaign against Europe, imposing high tariffs, making threats to seize Greenland from Denmark by force and rattling trust within the NATO military alliance. He had threatened retaliation if American tech companies are penalized.
Google’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, called the fine "product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants" that will hurt European businesses and consumers. He said the EU’s Digital Markets Act forces Google "to strip away real-time search features Europeans love — like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights, and restaurants — and dismantle safety protections on Google Play." The company’s complaint is familiar: regulation cuts into profit, and profit gets recast as public harm.
José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, said the company has worked hard to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act and has expressed its concerns about the effects of recent decisions by the European Commission. He said, "We appreciate the engagement by the administration and U.S. government." Representatives of Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and there was no immediate comment from the Brussels-based European Commission.
What They Call Fairness
Teresa Ribera, the commission’s executive vice president for clean, just and competitive transition, said, "The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine. And European consumers have a right to be told by app developers where to sign up to the best offers, even when the app store owner does not get a cut."
Google had recently lost its appeal of a $4.5 billion antitrust fine imposed by the EU for throttling competition and reducing consumer choice through the dominance of its mobile Android operating system. The European Commission said it was acting in the interest of consumers after an investigation of Google. Thomas Regnier, a European Commission spokesperson, said, "In the EU, businesses have the right to compete fairly. Gatekeepers have the obligation to ensure a level playing field and consumers the right to choose for cheaper alternative offers."
The EU describes Amazon, Apple, Google parent Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok owner ByteDance as gatekeepers that control access for consumers. Alphabet reported $403 billion in revenue last year. That’s the scale of the machine at the center of this fight: enormous corporate power, state power answering it, and everyone else stuck living with the consequences when the bosses and bureaucrats redraw the rules.