From Google Fines to French Wine: The Trade Case Against the DMA
Brussels has spent two years testing how much regulatory pain Washington will tolerate before reaching for the tariff book. President Donald Trump may have supplied the answer. His threatened Section 301 investigation—a process that allows the United States to retaliate against foreign practices that unfairly burden U.S. commerce—could turn Europe’s digital rulebook into a transatlantic trade fight.
The immediate dispute revives a familiar argument. Brussels says it is policing anticompetitive conduct under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Washington says Europe is taxing American companies. After two years of enforcement, the second account has become much harder to dismiss—which makes the Trump administration’s escalation worth taking seriously.
Last week, the European Commission fined Google €890 million under the Digital Markets Act. It imposed €460 million for favoring Google’s own shopping, hotel, transportation, and sports results in Google Search, and €430 million for restricting developers from directing Google Play users to cheaper purchasing options. The penalty was Google’s first under the law and the largest imposed under it to date.
The next day, Trump responded on Truth Social. He announced that the United States would “immediately” open a Section 301 investigation into what he called Europe’s “robbing” of American companies. The United States, he wrote, is not Europe’s “PIGGYBANK.” He predicted that the penalties would be “entirely reversed” and followed by a substantial tariff.
Some of Trump’s particulars do not survive contact with the record. The $15 billion attributed to Apple appears to include the Commission’s €13 billion Irish state-aid recovery order in a tally of “fines,” though it was not a fine. Nor can a Section 301 investigation “reverse” a legally binding Commission decision. Only the European Union courts can do that.
But the faulty arithmetic distracts from the two questions that matter: Is the underlying grievance well-founded? And, if so, is trade retaliation a defensible response?
On the first question, the evidence has become considerably harder to dismiss. On the second, the answer is probably yes—but for reasons rooted less in trade policy than in the political economy of European regulation.