Brussels must stop using the US as a “piggybank,” the American president warned
US President Donald Trump has announced that he is opening a trade investigation into the EU, after Brussels fined Google $1 billion for violating its competition laws. Trump added that the investigation will likely end in new tariffs on the bloc.
In a post on his Truth Social platform on Friday, Trump said that the US will “immediately initiate a 301 Investigation” into the EU’s “practice of ‘ROBBING’ American companies.” The EU, he added, “will pay a very big price” for its decision on Thursday to fine Google €890 million ($1 billion) for prioritizing its own services over those of competitors in search results.
“After having fined Apple, for no reason at all, 15 billion dollars, Meta, 3 billion dollars, Amazon 2.5 billion dollars, and many others, we have just been informed that Google, a truly advanced and amazing group, has been fined yet another 1 billion dollars,” Trump wrote. “This brings the Google total to over 18 billion dollars.”
“The United States of America is not a ‘PIGGYBANK’ for Europe, nor will we allow it to be!” he warned.
In addition to Thursday’s fine, Google lost a years-long legal battle against a separate €4.6 billion ($5.2 billion) EU antitrust fine earlier this month. The European Commission imposed the fine in 2018, accusing Google of abusing Android’s market dominance by requiring smartphone makers to pre-install Google Search and Chrome.
Trump’s figure of “18 billion dollars” is misleading. Google has been fined roughly $12 billion by the European Commission over the last decade, with separate penalties imposed by national regulators.
A 301 investigation is a US government inquiry into whether another country’s trade policies are unfair, discriminatory, or damaging to American commerce. Trump said that such an investigation into the EU’s fines against US tech companies will likely result in “a substantial tariff” being placed on the bloc “at the earliest possible moment.”
The fines handed down to Google this month alone will cover more than 2% of the EU’s annual common budget. With its finances stretched from arming Ukraine, a European Commission spokesperson told Politico last week that the payout from Google will help alleviate the bloc’s growing budget deficit.
“Google’s involuntary ‘contribution’ to the EU budget is now greater than that of two-thirds of the member states,” US Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg noted in a post on X on Friday. “Enough is enough.”
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