Market Data 
- Donald Trump is threatening Europe on behalf of Big Tech.
- Donald Trump is also telling Big Tech to watch its step.
- Does Trump mean both things? Or maybe one thing at one time, and a different thing at another? Maybe.
Fact: The Trump administration is fighting with European regulators, arguing that they are too harsh on American tech companies.
Also a fact: The Trump administration says it is going to regulate American tech companies because they have “too much power.”
That’s a confusing, but accurate, summary of the new administration’s relationship with Big Tech. On the one hand, it is gearing up for a brawl with European lawmakers who have been punishing the likes of Apple, Google, and Meta for perceived antitrust violations. On the other, it is warning Big Tech companies that it will be watching for signs that the platforms are behaving badly.
We got to see both sides of that positioning last week, via two memos from the administration. On Thursday, Trump’s Federal Trade Commission announced an “Inquiry on Tech Censorship,” aimed at “technology platforms [that] deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations.”
Platformer’s Casey Newton speculates that the FTC’s effort “seems designed to unearth cherry-picked anecdotes that favor one political party,” and that seems right to me. I would certainly be surprised if the FTC spends a lot of time looking at the way Twitter/X has shifted very far to the right under Elon Musk’s ownership.
But a day later, team Trump also offered Big Tech companies a chance at something they really, really want: Relief from European regulation, in the form of a memo announcing that the federal government will be “defending American companies from extortion.”
The short summary of that one: Trump says he will threaten tariffs against countries that use “taxes, fines, practices, and policies that foreign governments levy on American companies.”
Which happens to be exactly what tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg, have been asking Trump to do (and why Zuckerberg and his Meta reps have been referring to European regulation as “almost like a tariff” for the last few weeks).
One way to look at the two different tech messages coming out of Trump’s White House could be a basic carrot and stick: We’ll fight the Europeans on your behalf — but you’d better toe the line at home.
But another lens could simply be about different messages for different audiences: Trump tells the men running some of the biggest companies in the world — the ones lined up behind him at his inauguration — that he’ll work on their behalf. Meanwhile, his proxies tell Trump voters that they’re keeping up the pressure on Big Tech, just like they promised. Like last month’s JD Vance interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation”, when the vice president announced that “we believe fundamentally that Big Tech does have too much power,” and that the companies need to “stop engaging in censorship.”
As always, we’ll need to see what Trump et al actually do because announcing investigations and threatening tariffs are one thing — following up is another. Seeing where the administration puts its energy will be telling.
