U.S. officials excoriated the European Union for discriminating against American technology companies and threatened to penalize European tech companies in return, in a social media post on Tuesday.
The pronouncements appeared to signal a rockier period for U.S.-E.U. trade relations, as the two governments work to finalize a trade framework they announced this year. The United States has been pushing Europe to open up its tech sector to American firms. But U.S. officials have complained that the European Union has not walked back broader regulation of company business practices while also proceeding with investigations of major American tech firms like Google, X, Amazon and Meta.
In a social media post, the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which has carried out the negotiations, said that the European Union and some member states had “persisted in a continuing course of discriminatory and harassing lawsuits, taxes, fines and directives” against American companies.
The United States had raised concerns with the European Union about these issues for years “without meaningful engagement,” all while allowing European companies to operate freely in the United States, it said. If the European Union continues these policies, the United States would “have no choice but to begin using every tool at its disposal to counter these unreasonable measures,” the U.S.T.R. said. It named fees and restrictions on service companies among the possibilities, and said it would use the same approach against other countries that echoed Europe’s strategy.
The post singled out potential European service providers that could be targeted by name, listing Accenture, DHL, Mistral, SAP, Siemens and Spotify, among others.
American officials have long been frustrated by the European Union’s role as the world’s most aggressive regulator of the tech industry. But in threatening such direct retaliation the Trump administration is going much further to get officials in Brussels to back down.
European authorities have in recent months signaled a willingness to dial back some regulation of tech to bolster economic growth and encourage development of artificial intelligence. But E.U. officials have shown less openness to changing key regulations related to social media and anticompetitive behavior that are often at the center of American complaints.
Earlier this month, President Trump and other administration officials lashed out at the bloc after its regulators fined X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, roughly $140 million for violating digital transparency rules. Another investigation underway of X could lead to further fines and penalties.
“Europe has to be very careful,” Mr. Trump said last week.
Authorities in Brussels have in recent weeks also initiated fresh investigations of companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta. That is on top of the billions in penalties that have been issued over the past decade against American tech giants for violating antitrust, digital privacy and tax rules.
The broadside comes at a fraught moment for the trans-Atlantic relationship. While the United States and Europe have historically been closely intertwined allies, the past year has strained that relationship.
Mr. Trump has pulled back from joint defense, insisting that Europeans need to spend more to protect their own nations. His global trade war has rocked automotive, pharmaceutical and other industries across the continent. And many Europeans have been shocked by the administration’s rhetoric — starting with a speech delivered by Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference in February.
In those remarks, Mr. Vance specifically criticized technology regulation, warning that “free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”
In recent weeks, the White House released a national security plan that lambasted Europe, insisting that the administration wants “Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”
That document argued that Europe is declining economically partly because of “national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.”
So far this year, the Trump administration has announced that it has struck 15 trade frameworks and initial agreements. But many of these deals are works in progress that leave major components yet to be worked out.
In fact, European officials celebrated the fact that they had not made major concessions on digital regulation — which they painted as a matter of national sovereignty — when they and the Trump administration struck a rough agreement for 15 percent across-the-board tariffs. But for Washington, digital restrictions remain a sticking point.
With support from the U.S. tech industry, the Trump administration has taken an aggressive posture against other government’s digital restrictions as well. Earlier this month, the United States informed the British government that it would pause fulfilling a technology-related agreement between the two countries, which included more collaboration on artificial intelligence and nuclear energy.
American officials felt that Britain wasn’t making sufficient progress in lowering trade barriers as it had promised, people familiar with the discussions said. U.S. officials had been pushing for Britain to loosen its food safety standards, and had also expressed frustration with Britain’s online safety rules and digital services taxes levied on American firms.
Matthew Sinclair, the senior director of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said it was “unfortunate that lack of progress in broader trade issues resulted in its implementation being suspended.”
“The U.K. should do more to address barriers to trade in digital services, whether that is taxes that single out U.S. multinationals or regulators wielding unprecedented powers without the guardrails that should protect companies against disproportionate or simply misguided attacks on their businesses,” he said.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
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