Last January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was eager to have an ally in the White House to go after foreign regulations “pushing” American tech firms “to censor more” content.
That was days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, and the president has been quite willing to take up that mantle. It’s led to an escalating stand-off between the United States and European Union that could increasingly weigh on their relationship.
The president has pushed the European Union and other foreign governments to pull back on regulating US tech firms, while also promoting fewer guardrails domestically. His administration intensified those efforts last month by threatening to penalize European tech firms and seeking to block prominent tech safety researchers and a regulator from entering the United States.
The growing tensions are rooted in a fundamental disagreement over the regulation of tech companies. Regulators in Europe, a global leader in tech-related legislation, believe some guardrails promote online safety, free speech and industry competition. The United States has taken a largely hands-off approach.
Republicans, now controlling the US government, have in recent years framed content moderation efforts as “censorship.” And US tech companies — chafing at having to comply with new EU requirements or face fines — may now be seizing an opportunity to push back.
It’s a conflict that could put Silicon Valley in the crosshairs of wider US-EU trade negotiations this year, especially as the Trump administration views unfettered advancement in artificial intelligence as crucial for the economy and national security.
“There’s kind of a collision… between the Trump administration’s complaints about censorship and the desire of Big Tech firms to, in some cases, scrap the digital legislation from the EU entirely,” said Lindsay Gorman, managing director of the technology program at the German Marshall Fund policy organization. “We could be on an increased collision course because EU officials have said that they’re not going to be bulldozed.”
Here’s what we know.
A years-old conflict
The US-EU fight over regulating tech dates back to Trump’s first administration. American officials sharply criticized the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation after it went into effect in 2018. US tech companies had also lobbied against the law.
EU antitrust actions against American tech firms also prompted discrimination claims, which European officials denied.
In 2023 and 2024, respectively, Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) went into effect. The laws imposed sweeping new rules around social media moderation, targeted advertising and interoperability between major platforms, as well as costly fines for tech giants that violated the laws.
Experts note that the laws were in some ways intended to make life easier for the tech companies, preventing them from having to comply with different laws from the EU’s 27 member states. (Trump has encouraged a similar approach in the United States regarding AI regulation.)
As Trump prepared for his second term, tech CEOs including Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook sought to curry favor with him and raised concerns about European regulations.
Vice President JD Vance in February used his speech at the Munich Security Conference to rail against European “censorship.” The same month, Trump signed a memo saying his administration would investigate and consider imposing tariffs on foreign governments that tax US tech companies or impose policies that “incentivize … censorship.”
For its part, European officials have pushed back on the notion that their rules unfairly target American firms.
“As we have made clear many times, our rules apply equally and fairly to all companies operating in the EU,” Thomas Regnier, the European Commission’s spokesperson for tech sovereignty, said in a statement to CNN. “We will continue to enforce our rules fairly, and without discrimination.”
US-EU tensions escalate
The EU fined Apple and Meta a combined €700 million ($797 million) in April, the first enforcement action under the DMA. Meta criticized the move as a “tariff” designed to “handicap successful American businesses,” and Apple said the EU was “unfairly targeting” the company.
In September, Trump threatened the EU with a tariff investigation after it fined Google $3.45 billion for violating its antitrust laws. Trump called the fine “very unfair,” adding that the money “would otherwise go to American Investments and Jobs.”
The Commission in December fined X around $140 million, saying the “deceptive design” of its blue verification checkmark and other measures violated the DSA. X owner Elon Musk called the fine “crazy” and urged a “response not just to the EU, but also to the individuals who took this action against me.” Several US lawmakers also bashed the fine, including Vance, who said on X that “the EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.”
Later that month, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer threatened European tech companies including SAP, Spotify and Mistral with “fees or restrictions” if the EU didn’t back down on regulatory actions against American firms.
“If the EU and EU Member States insist on continuing to restrict, limit, and deter the competitiveness of U.S. service providers through discriminatory means, the United States will have no choice but to begin using every tool at its disposal to counter these unreasonable measures,” Greer said in an X post.
Days later, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced visa sanctions against Thierry Breton, a former European commissioner involved in the DSA, as well as four employees of organizations that combat online disinformation and hate, for alleged censorship.
Regnier condemned the travel restrictions and said the European Commission denies that its laws “amount to any form of censorship,” adding that the rules “ensure a safe, fair, and level playing field for all companies, applied fairly and without discrimination.” Breton responded in an X post noting the DSA’s broad support among European lawmakers and saying: “To our American friends: ‘Censorship isn’t where you think it is.’”
The Trump administration’s claims of “censorship” by Europe comes even as the president himself has taken actions that could chill free speech domestically, such as targeting journalists and seeking to deport non-citizen professors and students who have spoken in support of Palestinians.
A trade talks lever
The fight could become a linchpin in broader negotiations this year.
The US and EU are continuing hammer out and implement the details of a trade deal reached in July. The agreement included a commitment to address “non-tariff barriers” to trade, which Gorman said “was kind of a wink and a nod to the digital regulations, but it didn’t get resolved.”
“It seems like the tariffs conversation has somewhat come to a conclusion … but the technology issues, and in particular the enforcement of the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, are the unfinished business of the US-EU trade deal,” she added.
The EU does not appear to be backing down. The Commission announced new investigations in December into potential anticompetitive behavior by both Meta and Google.
EU lawmakers have proposed a digital omnibus aiming to simplify — which could amount to scaling back — some of its tech rules to make Europe more competitive in tech and AI. But not all officials agree that regulation hurts innovation. The proposal also didn’t seem to satisfy American officials; after it was introduced, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called for further rules rollbacks in exchange for lower tariffs.
The conflict underscores the need for Europe to build its own technologies and reduce its reliance on Silicon Valley, said Giorgos Verdi, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“Could the US use its dominance over AI chips, its dominance over cloud in Europe, its dominance over AI systems in order to exert more pressure?” Verdi said. “In order to build more resilience for Europe … there is a geopolitical case for European innovations to emerge.”
