The European Union has, time and time again, promised “fairness” and “competition” in its digital regulations. Instead, what it has delivered is a regulatory regime with unnecessary digital trade barriers that hurt American technology firms, workers, and consumers.
President Donald Trump and his administration have fought hard to win real trade victories for the American economy. Thousands of jobs are coming home. Manufacturing capacity is climbing. Major companies are putting real money behind domestic growth. That progress is real, and many Americans are feeling it.
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However, European bureaucrats are trying their best to stymie that progress. The Trump administration rightly fought for the EU to remove “unjustified digital trade barriers” in its trade agreement last year. Since then, Brussels has not removed any of these regulations, including the Digital Markets Act, prompting 25 lawmakers to urge the administration to launch a trade investigation into the EU’s digital trade practices. Brussels’ technology agenda is not just hurting American companies; it is undermining the very progress Trump has fought to secure.
This digital trade imbalance originating from the DMA, a sweeping rule that hides behind lukewarm promises of fair competition, is in reality a regulatory morass designed to limit American technology companies from doing business in Europe. It forces so-called “gatekeepers” to open up their platforms, change how their services work, and comply with a maze of mandates written by Brussels bureaucrats. Six of the seven companies designated as “gatekeepers” are U.S.-based or have U.S. parent companies. That’s not a fluke — it’s a targeted attack on America’s free market principles and prohibits American technology companies from innovating.
The DMA’s damage will not stay confined to corporate balance sheets. It imposes punitive fees, threatening American companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple with redesigning their products, weakening the security built into their own systems, and removing features that made these platforms and products worth using.
Who bears the burden of these fees? It is the small business that loses the tools it relies on to find customers. It is the developer needing to navigate a complex regulatory system. It is the consumer stuck with a clunkier, less secure app because European regulators decided they knew better than the engineers who built it.
Call the DMA what it is. It does not create competition. It punishes success, hurting the companies that built products people actually choose to use, and drags everyone else down with them.
THE END OF INTERNET PRIVACY: EUROPE HIJACKS AMERICAN TECH, AND CHINA BENEFITS
Also concerning is the effort to incorporate some of these same European principles into American law. For example, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act would import the same regulations that would compromise and police American digital platforms. While the administration has worked diligently to secure a fair-trade deal with the bloc, now is not the time to undercut our friends in the administration.
At a time when adversaries like China are racing ahead in critical technologies, America must maintain its global competitiveness and bolster its standing as a technology leader. That means that the administration must confront discriminatory trade practices and leverage all the necessary tools, including a Section 301 trade investigation, to fight back against these digital regulations. For too long, Brussels has benefited from Washington’s restraint. That must end now.
Paul Teller, President of Teller Strategies, spent more than 15 years working for U.S. House and Senate conservatives and all four years in the Trump-Pence White House.
