(Dec 15): The European Union’s chief trade negotiator said he would defend the bloc’s technology rules in a rebuke to US efforts to water down EU digital regulations.
Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have made clear that Washington won’t lower tariffs on European steel and aluminium unless the EU eases some of its rules.
“Our regulations are democratically adopted by us through a very thorough legislative process,” the European Commission’s trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV Monday. “We are going to protect our tech sovereignty.”
The EU has been struggling to win tariff exemptions from Trump after having agreed to remove all duties on American industrial goods while accepting a 15% tariff on nearly all its exports. The US president has chided the EU — which he has said was created to “screw” the US — over its trade surplus in goods and perceived barriers to American trade.
Trump has specifically called out the EU’s digital regulations as the kind of non-tariff trade barrier that his so-called reciprocal tariffs are intended to target, with the White House signalling previous EU penalties as a form of duty.
Sefcovic said he’s in permanent contact with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
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Lutnick said in an interview with Bloomberg last month that the EU needed to resolve outstanding legal cases it’s taken against American tech giants, including Alphabet Inc’s Google, Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc.
Despite Trump’s threats, the EU has pressed ahead with enforcement of its digital antitrust rules, with recent fines against Apple Inc and Meta Platforms Inc of €500 million (US$587 million or $757.54 million) and €200 million respectively.
The EU also hit Elon Musk’s X social network with a €120 million fine this month for violating the bloc’s controversial content-moderation law. US Vice President JD Vance said in a post on X before the fine was announced that the “EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.”
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Previously, the EU issued costly penalties against other firms, including more than US$8 billion in fines against Alphabet Inc’s Google and a separate order for Apple to pay Ireland back taxes of €13 billion. Those, however, were done under traditional competition law and not using the bloc’s Digital Markets Act.
Sefcovic said that some of the conversations with the US have focused on European machinery exports, which the US needs to build factories. The problem is that many European exporters are running into fines and have withheld shipments to the US.
“If America wants to reindustrialise they need the machines and we are ready to send them,” he said. “But the machines are all exported at very low volumes, or not at all, because these machine exporters are afraid that they could get a fine.”
Germany has pushed for a deal with the US to shield the manufacturing sector from tariffs. Sefcovic said some machinery exporters are already facing steep fines.
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