WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump declared Friday that the United States is launching a formal trade investigation into the European Union, accusing the bloc of unfairly targeting American technology companies with massive financial penalties.
The announcement came just one day after the EU handed down a fine of 890 million euros — roughly $1 billion — against Google, saying the tech giant violated digital antitrust rules by structuring Google Play and its widely used search engine in ways that steered users toward its own products and away from competitors.
In a lengthy social media post, Trump said he had repeatedly warned the EU about its pattern of penalizing U.S. tech firms, specifically calling out Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and others by name.
“The United States of America is not a ‘PIGGYBANK’ for Europe, nor will we allow it to be!” Trump wrote, declaring that his post should serve as official notice of an immediate trade probe into what he described as the practice of ‘ROBBING’ American companies and, by extension, American taxpayers.
“The European Union will pay a very big price for this illegal and highly unethical conduct, which I have consistently warned them about,” he added.
Trump also asserted in the post that the fines imposed on American companies “will be entirely reversed” and predicted that “a substantial TARIFF” would be placed on the EU “at the earliest possible moment,” signing off with “Stay tuned!”
The announcement follows the White House’s move just a day earlier to impose double-digit tariffs on goods from more than 60 countries, citing those nations’ failure to adequately crack down on products made using forced labor. Those new tariffs replace temporary 10% global import taxes Trump had put in place after the Supreme Court struck down his larger tariff measures. They are being implemented under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, a law that allows the president to impose import taxes and other penalties on countries found to engage in trade practices deemed “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable,” or “discriminatory.”
The billion-dollar Google fine represents the latest in a series of major enforcement actions taken by Brussels against large technology companies — a regulatory effort that has positioned the EU as a global leader in reining in powerful firms from Silicon Valley to Beijing. The EU has pressed forward with these actions even as Trump has lashed out at the 27-nation bloc’s digital regulations, imposed steep tariffs, threatened to seize Greenland from Denmark by force, and shaken confidence within the NATO alliance.
Google had already lost an appeal of a separate $4.5 billion antitrust fine the EU previously imposed, related to the company’s use of its Android mobile operating system to limit competition and consumer choice.
Teresa Ribera, the European Commission’s executive vice president for clean, just and competitive transition, defended the latest fine, saying: “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’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, pushed back sharply, calling the fine “product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants” that he said would hurt European businesses and consumers alike. Walker argued that 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 European Commission classifies several of the world’s biggest tech companies — including Amazon, Apple, Google parent Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and TikTok owner ByteDance — as “gatekeepers” that control how consumers access digital markets. Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier defended the regulatory framework, saying: “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.” Alphabet reported $403 billion in revenue last year.
