Last week, US President Donald Trump made the latest in a string of recent threats to hit Europe with more tariffs for its approach to regulating the world’s biggest tech companies.
Writing on his Truth Social account on 5 September, Trump said the the European Commission’s decision to issue Google with a $3.5 billion anti-trust fine for anti-competitive behaviour in advertising and search was a “very unfair” penalty against “American ingenuity”, before threatening to issue retaliatory tariffs to “nullify” the fines being charged to US tech companies by the EU.