As President grapples with our trade relationships around the world, one longstanding issue has emerged: Europes unfair, anticompetitive trade policies governing tech and telecom. Americas innovators and job creators have been treated unfairly for far too long.Â
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer recently announced two new s related to forced labor and manufacturing. Rumblings in Washington, alongside warnings from senior administration officials, indicate that the Trump administration might soon launch a Section 301 investigation into Europes discriminatory digital policies. Such a probe is long overdue and should be welcomed.Â
But a fair, balanced and transparent digital partnership with our European friends is not a given. Heres why. Over the next several weeks, Europe will undoubtedly attempt to forestall any potential investigation by pulling the United States into an endless, futile negotiation in which they promise to fix every problem, but in reality simply run out the clock on addressing the issues.
The administration would be wise to avoid getting dragged into such a pointless endeavor that will tie it up in and result in an imaginary, never-concluded deal.
Weve seen this movie before. During the Obama years, the United States entered negotiations with Europe for the . The process ran for three long years without ever producing a final agreement, absorbing time and attention but doing little to address imbalances or alter the underlying trajectory of the trade relationship.
The stakes are far too high for a repeat feature. The most consequential distortion in the transatlantic relationship is unfolding in the regulatory treatment of digital services and platforms. Here, the terms of competition are increasingly being set by a European agenda that is unmistakably protectionist. This unfair arrangement cannot continue, and its high time we got to the bottom of it.Â
Europe has spent years building a digital regulatory regime that places unique burdens on American technology companies. What it presents as neutral governance to promote so-called European “digital sovereignty” has, in practice, concentrated restrictions on a small group of U.S.-based platforms while leaving domestic competitors largely untouched. And as digital innovation becomes more central to economic and national security, that targeted enforcement has only intensified in scope and scale.
Europe has already directed roughly $5 billion in data-privacy penalties at American companies, often in the name of “fair competition” or “consumer protection.” At the same, it forces firms like Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft to delay product launches, strip out features, or offer watered-down versions of their services under the EUs Digital Markets Act (DMA), Digital Services Act (DSA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Comparable scrutiny of non-U.S. competitors has been far less evident.
More recently, that posture has turned even more aggressive. European authorities raided the Paris offices of X in February, following months of investigations and a â¬120 million fine imposed without any detailed basis for the charge until a U.S. House Committee subpoenaed the decision.
Now European officials are rewriting their proposed Digital Networks Act (DNA) to insert new “network usage fees” that would fall almost entirely on U.S. firms. This, despite a prior commitment in a recent joint U.S.-EU trade framework to avoid such fees. Slipping them into the DNA framework amounts to a deliberate breach of that agreement.
This is not exactly the record of a neutral regulator or a reliable trade ally. Nor is there much indication that Europe intends to ease its push to reshape the digital marketplace through protectionist policies that deliberately single out the United States.
A Section 301 investigation is needed into these practices, to address . It would allow the United Sta
