Trade tensions: The Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. The government has said Google should be ordered to immediately sell-off its advertising exchange, AdX, as well as make its technology interact with rivals. — Dreamstime
WASHINTON: US President Donald Trump threatened a probe on the European Union (EU) that could prompt fresh tariffs in response to the bloc’s fining of Alphabet Inc’s Google over findings the company exploited its advantage over rivals.
Trump made his warning in a social media post last Friday after the EU announced it was fining Google almost €3bil and as it ordered the search giant to stop favouring its own advertising technology services.
“This is on top of the many other fines and taxes that have been issued against Google and other American tech companies, in particular,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
“Very unfair, and the American taxpayer will not stand for it!
“As I have said before, my administration will not allow these discriminatory actions to stand.”
Trump has previously used so-called 301 probes to target imports from Brazil over its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro.
He’s long criticised Europe for its fines against US technology firms and earlier this month warned he would impose “substantial” tariffs on countries that imposed digital taxes, rules, or regulations that hit American companies.
Furthermore, the US President said the topic of digital taxes and fines came up at last Thursday night dinner at the White House with top tech executives, including Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Meta Platforms Inc’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple Inc’s Tim Cook.
“They weren’t complaining about, in that regard, China.
They weren’t complaining about other places. It’s the EU,” Trump told reporters last Friday.
“We can’t let that happen.”
The European Commission said last Friday that Google had abused its dominance by giving its own ad exchanges a competitive advantage and must bring the practices to an end.
“When markets fail, public institutions must act to prevent dominant players from abusing their power,” EU antitrust Commissioner Teresa Ribera said in a statement.
“True freedom means a level playing field, where everyone competes on equal terms and citizens have a genuine right to choose.”
The company immediately vowed to appeal. Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice-president for regulatory affairs at Google, said the move “imposes an unjustified fine and requires changes that will hurt thousands of European businesses by making it harder for them to make money.”
The fine, which totalled €2.95bil, ranks among Brussels’ toughest sanctions and is the second-highest by the EU against Google for alleged abuses of dominance.
It follows a €4.125bil Android penalty and a €2.42bil fine for crushing shopping search rivals. A 1.49bil AdSense levy was annulled last year.
The decisions push Google’s EU liabilities to just shy of 10 billion euros – far higher than fines against Apple, Meta and Microsoft Corp.
The Mountain View, California-based company is No. 1 in the US$757.5bil global digital ad market, according to 2025 estimates by research firm EMarketer.
In total, worldwide, Google is expected to pull in US$205.04bil in digital ad revenue in 2025.
Most of that – US$171.72bil – comes from Google’s global search advertising business.
The remaining US$33.33bil is from display ads.
Google runs an ad-buying service for marketers and an ad-selling one for publishers, as well as a trading exchange where both sides complete transactions in lightning-fast auctions.
The European Publishers Council, which brought the complaint to the European Commission, said “a fine will not fix Europe’s broken adtech market.” — Bloomberg
