[BRUSSELS] US President Donald Trump threatened a probe that could prompt fresh tariffs in response to the European Union fining Alphabet’s Google over findings that the company abused its dominance by giving its own ad exchanges a competitive advantage.
The president made his warning in a social media post on Friday (Sep 5) after the EU announced it was fining Google almost three billion euros (S$4.5 billion) and ordering 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 social media. “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.
The US president said that the topic of digital taxes and fines came up at a Thursday night dinner at the White House with top tech executives, including Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Meta Platforms’ Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook.
“They weren’t complaining about, in that regard, to China. They weren’t complaining about other places. It’s the European Union,” the president told reporters on Friday. “We can’t let that happen.”
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The European Commission said on Friday that Google had exploited its advantage over rivals and that it 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. “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 three billion euros, ranks among Brussels’ toughest sanctions and is the second highest by the EU against Google for alleged abuses of dominance. It follows a 4.1 billion euros Android penalty and a 2.4 billion euros fine for crushing shopping search rivals. A 1.5 billion euros AdSense levy was annulled last year. The decisions push Google’s EU liabilities to just shy of 10 billion euros – far outpacing fines against Apple, Meta and Microsoft.
The Mountain View, California-based company is No 1 in the US$757.5 billion global digital ad market, according to 2025 estimates by research firm EMarketer. In total, worldwide, Google is expected to pull in US$205.04 billion in digital ad revenue in 2025. Most of that, US$171.72 billion, comes from Google’s global search advertising business. The remaining US$33.33 billion 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.
Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, which brought the complaint to the European Commission, said that “a fine will not fix Europe’s broken adtech market”.
“Without strong and decisive enforcement, Google will simply write this off as a cost of business while consolidating its dominance in the AI era,” she said. “Europe risks undermining its own rules and weakening the news media and publishing sector.”
The EU punishment comes at a tense moment for EU-US trade relations, with Trump repeatedly deriding the bloc’s efforts to rein in Silicon Valley giants. Although Google faces antitrust scrutiny worldwide, it won some relief this week when a US judge ruled that its search business would not need to be broken up to address the harms alleged by the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Google’s adtech operations, however, also remain under threat in the US. The DOJ is expected to file proposed remedies later on Friday in another case, ahead of a Sep 22 hearing on those proposals. Previously, the department had floated forcing Google to divest its Ad Manager platform to tackle the alleged anticompetitive risks.
The EU’s Ribera pointed to the potential for a US ruling that would force Google to break up its ad tech platform.
“At this stage, it appears that the only way for Google to end its conflict of interest effectively is with a structural remedy, such as selling some part of its Adtech business,” she said.
The EU warned Google in 2023 that it had abused its dominance in advertising technology to harm online publishers. At the time, the Brussels-based commission said Google had favoured its own ad exchange programme over its rivals and bolstered the company’s central role in the ad tech supply chain.
Ribera’s predecessor Margrethe Vestager said then that only a “mandatory divestment” of part of its business would solve the issues. The Dane had spent a decade in Brussels, where she hit Google with fines of more than eight billion euros across three different cases, although one penalty was annulled and another cut by EU judges. BLOOMBERG
