Trump wants no more US big tech probes in Europe: will they now end?

Newly MAGA-friendly American tech giants have been almost begging Donald Trump to make the European Union stop its probes into firms’ various violations of the bloc’s rules. The US President has heard their prayers – but will Europe really back down now?

Big tech CEOs are by now fully supportive, at least on the surface, of the Trump agenda. Whenever they get the chance, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and, of course, Elon Musk – the lot of them – joyfully proclaim that America, indeed, is now great again.

Quite a few of these, as Joe Biden called them, members of the “tech industrial complex” stood a few feet away from Trump as he was being sworn in as president last week, and Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to back the Republican candidate in the election.

Cozying up to a new reality is, of course, smart. Trump can be vengeful and wield his power mercilessly – so if big tech wants to survive his four-year term unscathed, they better fall in line.

Besides, despite their recent closeness to Trump, the US tech giants are still on notice. Vice President JD Vance recently said, “We believe fundamentally that big tech does have too much power.”

Antitrust investigations by the Federal Trade Commission are also still active and will probably hang over the techies like axes that could be swung the minute Trump’s people smell something fishy.

Still, the idea that Trump will be nice to you if you’re nice to him is also an opportunity – to, for instance, get some help in pushing back Chinese advances in AI with DeepSeek having already caused a meltdown in the stock market.

It’s also a chance to fend off what tech companies say are attacks against them in the EU but are actually official digital regulation probes seeking to establish whether the platforms violate the bloc’s legal packages – the Digital Services Act (DSA), the AI Act, and the Digital Markets Act.

The EU has so far resisted taking preemptive decisions such as ending the investigations and appeasing the Americans. This wouldn’t be popular with European citizens.

But so far, it’s all words – we’ll have to wait and see which path of action the Trump administration chooses. Seeing how the new White House acts on other fronts, there’s no reason to believe it won’t be confrontational.

Investigate, fine, repeat

The EU has been aggressively going after American tech companies for years. Most recently, Apple was fined €13 billion ($13.5 billion) for back taxes owed to Ireland, a EU member state.

The iPhone maker was also fined in March 2024 by the EU for allegedly “abusing its dominant position on the market for the distribution of music streaming apps.” That, of course, was related to Apple’s long-running dispute with Spotify.

Then, there’s Google. In September, it also lost a legal battle with the EU and had to pay $2.7 billion for using its price comparison tool to disadvantage European services. The giant is still fighting a 2011 antitrust case over Android.

Meta was fined €797 million ($830 million) in November over claims that it breached antitrust rules through its Facebook Marketplace service. In 2023, it lost another $1.3 billion after violating the EU’s data protection rules.

The European Commission has also begun probing US companies under the DSA on suspicion of breaches of the rules in areas linked to disinformation and the protection of children online.

Meta platforms are targeted, but Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, has been attracting the most attention.

Some moderate European politicians suspect that this particular platform has been actively interfering in the US presidential elections (this is what a whistleblower has also claimed) and is now attempting to do the same in Europe, particularly in Germany.

“The fact that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg already kissed Trump’s ring and Jeff Bezos is joining this ‘broligarchy’ in the (literal) front rows of Trump's inauguration, is concerning for both American and European democracies,” MEP Marketa Gregorova (Czechia/Greens) posted on X recently.

Podpora AfD v Německu; napadání britské vlády. Pan majitel této jím zničené platformy, který maže účty lidem, co s ním nesouhlasí a uměle zvyšuje dosah sám sobě, vyrazil na svatou válku do Evropy. Vměšování do demokracií může vypadat různě: i tak, že si do nich zaplatíte cestu. pic.twitter.com/ctzBmGCSB8

undefined Markétka Gregorová 🦄 (@MarketkaG) January 6, 2025

“Supporting the AfD in Germany. Attacking the British government. The owner of this platform he destroyed, who deletes the accounts of people who disagree with him and artificially increases his own reach, has set off on a holy war in Europe,” she added.

Pray, and the president will answer

Except for Musk, who’s constantly doom posting about the fate of Europe and appears in AfD – which is a far-right political party in Germany – rallies, the American big tech CEOs have been quite subtle so far. The EU is a large market for them, after all.

For instance, yes, Zuckerberg announced at the beginning of January that Meta was replacing its partnership with independent fact-checking organizations with an X-style community notes program, but the company soon clarified the decision only affected the US.

That’s because Meta would be violating the DSA if it implemented this new way of moderating content in Europe. Undoubtedly, whatever happens on Facebook or Instagram will be closely watched by lawmakers.

However, in that same video announcement, Zuckerberg seemed to almost directly address Trump, saying: “Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.”

His comments were soon shared by Musk on X. To make it easier for Trump (who doesn’t like reading) to understand, Zuckerberg later also pointed out in a podcast appearance that the EU had “forced” US tech firms operating in Europe to pay “more than $30 billion” in penalties for legal violations.

The Meta CEO used another Trumpian expression, musing that the way the European Commission applies the bloc’s competition rules is “almost like a tariff” on US companies.

Trump himself revealed in October that Apple’s boss Tim Cook reached out to him to voice concerns regarding a recent EU court decision.

Again, there’s no reason to believe that Bezos’ stance is any different, and TIME magazine revealed in 2023 that Altman’s OpenAI lobbied the EU to weaken AI regulation even as the company was calling for stronger AI guardrails.

They all had to wait, but soon after the inauguration, Trump responded to the tech billionaires’ wishes during his virtual appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“These are American companies, whether you like them or not, they are American companies, and they shouldn’t be doing that. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s a form of taxation,”

Donald Trump.

“They took court cases with Apple, and they supposedly won a case that most people didn’t think was much of a case. They won $15 billion or $16 billion from Apple. They won billions from Google. I think they’re after Facebook for billions and billions,” Trump said about the EU’s regulators.

“These are American companies, whether you like them or not, they are American companies, and they shouldn’t be doing that. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s a form of taxation,” he added.

Is there movement behind the scenes?

At least according to Jan Philipp Albrecht, co-president of Heinrich Bӧll Foundation, a Berlin-based think tank, the US is clearly becoming an “open opponent” of digital regulation, and its goal is to “bring Europe to its knees.”

“European heads of state and government and the new European Commission under Ursula von der Leyen should now be fully aware that Europe’s sovereignty is at stake. In the absence of a decisive response from the EU, the attacks from the US will continue,” wrote Albrecht.

He thinks it surely helps “the unholy alliance of Trump’s MAGA government and the tech CEOs” that the EU is currently essentially paralyzed by political turmoil in Berlin and Paris.”

The new White House might threaten a trade war in the form of tariffs – all because European regulations actually work, Albrecht said.

Plus, the geopolitical balance might suffer. Vance warned the EU last year that regulating X would be seen as an attack on freedom of expression and said it would lead the US to drop its support for NATO.

“The behavior of the US side is motivated by one thing above all: panic. It is now clear that EU countries are serious about enforcing their own rules in their own common market – the world’s largest. It is also clear that, unlike the US, the EU has not made its regulatory authorities toothless. Quite the contrary: it has armed them with swords,” wrote Albrecht.

Many Europeans might scoff at the idea of becoming a sort of American digital colony. Indeed, Nathan Brunner, CEO of Boterview, a Swiss AI company, told Cybernews he found statements from the other side of the Atlantic almost shockingly tone-deaf.

“What would US citizens think if the EU countries were to propose directives regulating freedom of expression in America? The US has no right to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries,” said Brunner.

“Ultimately, if US-based X and Meta platforms fail to comply with EU laws, they will be fined. If they don't pay the fine or refuse to comply with EU laws, we should ban them from accessing the EU market.”

“There is no secret technology that we can't copy behind X or Meta platforms. We could create similar platforms in two weeks,” added Brunner who's fond of disruptive technology.

That might be. But something might already be going on behind the scenes. In mid-January, the Financial Times (FT) had an interesting report saying that Brussels was “reassessing its investigations of big tech in a review.”

FT also quoted a senior official as saying that Trump’s election “was a factor,” and even though Henna Virkkunen, the commissioner in charge of tech sovereignty, soon told Reuters that the bloc’s investigations were continuing as normal, another representative briefed the press that “there may be a political reality that puts pressure on the technical work.”

Holding firm will be tough

This doesn’t sound good. To Parmy Olson, a Bloomberg Opinion technology columnist, it’s also sad because tech regulation in the EU actually seems to work.

Of course, Meta replied to the bloc’s demands to offer EU users an option to use Facebook without targeted advertising with a counter proposal of paying a €12.99 ($13.34) subscription fee. That was cheeky but the Commission then told Meta this wasn’t good enough, and the firm lowered the fee by 40%.

“This was like pulling teeth, but it was progress. The EU has already shown it can yield real behavioral change, as seen with Meta’s concessions on ad-free access,” wrote Olson.

Backing down to political pressure now, according to many, would be a mistake. In a new public letter, 36 European tech firms, industry bodies, and NGOs urged Brussels to continue its probe into large tech companies.

The Coalition for App Fairness has warned in the letter that some tech giants are actively undermining European rules and using “sham compliance strategies.” This stifles innovation and hurts the changes of smaller European tech firms to blossom.

So far, Virkkunen – who only began work in December and has already been attacked by pro-free speech bloggers in the US – appears to be holding firm.

“Contrary to what has been reported, there have never been any delays; the investigations are ongoing. In the EU, everybody who is doing business or having services operating here has to respect our rules and legislation,” she told journalists last week.

And some applauded Virkkunen’s calm statement that “all companies, whether American, European, or Chinese, have to respect the EU’s regulations.”

What supports her firm position is the fact that the EU’s digital regulations were approved by a broad coalition of 539 members of the European Parliament (only 54 voted against), transcending party lines.

So in theory, this shouldn’t be a conflict between European progressives and US MAGA Republicans, but a matter of upholding the rule of law and reminding Washington that, you know, at least tech regulation exists in the EU.

Then again, the Trumpers are rich and powerful and do not shy away from applying crude blackmail-like tactics. That’s why decoupling discussions about digital platform regulation from trade policy and security concerns won’t be so easy.