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European officials insist that the two-part fine on Google that includes €460 million for favoring its own search services and €430 million for the unfair way the Play Store is installed on smartphones, has nothing to do with trade policy. Brussels says the penalties reflect normal enforcement of EU law, like a similar fine against China’s Alibaba earlier this week. They also note that the total penalty is relatively modest, amounting to around 0.22 percent of the global annual turnover of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
“We'd rather have a very friendly relationship with all our partners but we are not going to refrain from acting because one of our partners doesn't like our law,” said Teresa Ribera, the European Commission's executive vice president for competition policy.
But that European attempt to keep the Google case separate from trade policy is unlikely to count for much in Washington as Trump gears up for his new tariff round.
U.S. trade czar Jamieson Greer said the “EU’s recent actions ... pose a real risk to the continuation of transatlantic stability with respect to trade” while Andrew Puzder, the U.S. ambassador to the EU, called the Google fine “the latest example of Brussels using regulation as a blunt instrument against American innovation.”
U.S. lawmakers this week also called on Trump to push back against the EU’s “discriminatory” digital policies and keep up the pressure on Brussels in order to defend American interests. The Republican legislators thanked the president for his “recent threat to impose tariffs” on countries imposing a digital service tax. The appeal underscored how the EU’s regulation of U.S. tech firms has become intertwined with domestic politics, particularly ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November.
The expiration of the temporary 10 percent tariffs on Friday opens the way for the administration to rebuild its tariffs against Europe using other legal mechanisms.
