Donald Trump says the US will launch an investigation into the European Union and threatened a fresh tariff over fines handed to some of the biggest American tech companies.
It comes days after the European Commission fined Google €890m ($1bn) for operating in a way that squeezed out competitors to its services.
In a post to Truth Social, which Trump owns, the US president said the EU would pay a “very big price” over how it had treated Google, along with other major US tech companies Apple, Meta, and Amazon, which have also been investigated.
“The United States of America is not a “PIGGYBANK” for Europe, nor will we allow it to be!” he wrote.
Trump said any fines should be “entirely reversed” and that he was initiating a trade investigation of the EU while considering “a substantial TARIFF”.
He added that the US would “immediately initiate a 301 investigation” over European regulators’ alleged practice of “robbing American companies and, in turn, the American taxpayer”.
Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, external gives The Office of the United States Trade Representative the power to react and investigate trade practices believed to be unfair. The second Trump Administration has launched several such investigations, external since last year.
The tariff threat comes just one day after Trump announced new tariffs on 60 trading partners, including the EU, UK and China, of between 10% and 12.5%.
Trump also last month threatened a 100% import tariff on any European country that introduces a digital services tax on American technology giants, despite many such nations already doing so, external for years.
Major tech companies, including Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon, have donated millions of dollars to funds behind Trump’s campaign and presidency.
José Castañeda, a spokesman for Google, told the BBC the company had “worked hard to comply” with Europe’s Digital Markets Act but had “expressed our concerns about the impact of recent EC decisions”.
“We appreciate the engagement by the administration and US government,” Castañeda added.
In addition to the recent fine against Google, Trump claimed in his post that Apple had received EU fines of $15bn, Meta fines of $3bn, and Amazon fines of $2.5bn.
Representatives of Meta, Apple and Amazon, as well as the European Commission, have been contacted for comment.
It was not clear where the figures cited by Trump come from.
Shortly before Trump was elected president in 2024, he said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, had called him directly to complain about fines the company had received from European regulators.
The call came not long after Apple lost a long-running dispute over unpaid taxes.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been fined several times by EU regulators, including for violations of user privacy and competition laws, external. It is also facing new fines over purportedly “addictive” features of its apps.
Meta last year said the EU was “attempting to handicap successful American businesses”.
Amazon, however, appears to have been investigated at times by the European Commission, but avoided major fines. The company in 2022 reached an agreement with regulators to change some of its practices in Europe.
A separate regulatory body in Luxembourg did impose on Amazon a fine of more than $800mn for violations of General Data Protection Regulation rules, but that was overturned last year, external.
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