As the President of the United States, Donald Trump He presented last Wednesday the list of duties that caused global shock, top European officials point out that large technology companies and digital services could be the Achilles’ heel of Washington.

The European Union has a trade surplus of 157 billion euros in goods, which means it exports more than it imports, but has a lack of 109 billion euros in services, including digital services. Large technology giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta dominate the European market with European Commission President Ursula von der Laien has pointed out several times that technology is one of the “papers” that the EU can play.

Yet The EU is in conflict about what to do for this; As Politico points out in his analysis.

Its emblematic technological laws such as laws on digital markets and digital services (DMA and DSA) are not designed to serve as retaliation tools. Efforts to impose higher taxes on technological giants in the past have failed. Governments could reduce their spending on large technology companies by revising public procurement policies, but in many cases Europe has no alternatives. Some countries, as Ireland has already warned that an EU blow to US technology companies would seriously harm the block and trigger the rage of billionaires of technology such as Ilon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zucker.

Europe could also develop its strongest trade weapon to date or otherwise “Big Bazoukas” as they call it, the ‘tool against coercion’ (Anti-Coercion Instrument), to specifically target US technology companies. But as a tool the ACI has not been tested: it was designed as a “commercial bazooka” after the first Trump government from 2017 to 2021 and has never been used.

Laws against trade wars

The EU has not yet carried out some of the landmark surveys it conducts under DMA (for digital competition) and DSA (on content control).

The Commission is going to impose fines on Apple and META for violating digital competition rules, the first such fines to be issued on the basis of DMA at the end of this week or early next week.

Brussels also found that MSK’s X has violated EU content control rules at a preliminary stage, which could lead to fines of 6% of the company’s annual worldwide turnover. Meta is also under investigation based on the same manual.

“DMA is not a negotiating paper,” said Renew Europe, the liberal team of the European Parliament, Stéphanie Yon-Courtin. “This regulation was designed to establish fair play rules in Europe, not to be used in a trade agreement with the United States.”

DMA chief legislator Andreas Schwab of the center -right European People’s Party (EPP) said, for his part that the Commission should have faster its forthcoming decisions on Apple and Meta, precisely to show that “there is nothing political in them”.

The main argument is that EU technological laws exist to support European values, not to discriminate or target a country. Any proposal to the contrary could harm the committee when Big Tech will have to submit the first fines and sanctions in accordance with laws.

Washington, however, has proposed the opposite. The Trump government threatened in February with retaliation against the EU technological regime, citing the perceived dangers to US companies and freedom of expression.

Taxes and contributions

There are, however other forms for retaliation such as imposing higher taxes on digital services and excluding US technology companies from submitting bids for state contracts.

The digital services “will inevitably come to the forefront,” said Finnish MP Aura Salla, who is also a former Meta top interesting team in Brussels.

EPP President Manfred Weber said on Tuesday that “digital giants pay little to our digital infrastructure to which they owe so much”.

Last Thursday, French government spokesman Sophie Prima said that the next EU retaliation wave could aim for “digital services that are currently not taxed”.

The French liberal European legislator Sandro Gozie, meanwhile, said the “taxation of US digital giants” as a choice.

The issue of taxation on digital services has been boiling in the EU for some time now, but the 27 bloc member states have no unanimity on this issue, and tax policy requires all EU countries to agree on a common policy.

For this reason, some countries have stated that they will go ahead. More recently, the Gulf Coalition Agreement has agreed to establish a digital tax by 2027 if there is no agreement at the international or union level.