Congressman Darin LaHood (IL-16), joined by 20 fellow congressmen, recently led a letter thanking President Trump for his leadership in securing a deal with the European Union—and emphasizing the importance of continued efforts to ensure Europe ends its discriminatory treatment of American tech businesses.
The letter aligns Congress’s priorities with Americans for Tax Reform’s ongoing efforts to address a slew of anti-American policies, targeting American companies with strict regulations and taking advantage of American innovation by levying steep fines.
The European Union has enacted a series of policies aimed at American businesses in Europe. The 2020 Digital Markets Act (DMA), 2022 Digital Services Act (DSA), and the 2024 EU AI Act (AIA), among several similar policies pushed by Brussels, have worked to artificially restrict the competitiveness of American enterprise in Europe.
Brussels’ regulatory regime, under the guise of pro-consumer policy, constructed an opaque labyrinth of requirements. Using vague language and arbitrary enforcement, the E.U. has discriminately applied its laws to target American companies with heavy-handed regulatory actions.
Every year American tech companies face costly fines and lengthy legal battles. Earlier this year, Apple was fined $587 million for perceived violations of the DMA’s antitrust requirements, ultimately forcing Apple to adopt confusing changes to its web services, while the year prior Apple faced a $2.05 billion penalty for similar reasoning. This is all despite Apple taking every step to comply with European regulation, as America’s largest tech companies are estimated to spend $4.3 to $12.5 billion per year, per company, on satisfying Brussels’ regulatory standards.
Unfortunately, this assault on American business goes beyond the regulatory reach of the E.U. itself. Individual member states have taken the opportunity to enact their own extortionary policies.
Countries such as France, Germany, and Italy have all pursued or enacted discriminatory digital measures. Digital services taxes have unfairly levied taxes on American companies, in opposition to previous multilateral agreements, while forced reinvestment schemes have funneled the revenue of American companies into unprofitable European ventures.
It’s no exaggeration when Representative LaHood calls “Europe’s regulatory experiment” an “abject failure.” Brussels’ targeting of American companies—already paying exorbitant compliance costs—reveals that Europe’s true aim is not consumer protection but instead profiting from the success of America’s most prosperous sector.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Caden Hubbs
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.atr.org and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
