Trump Threatens Trade Actions After EU Fines Google Over Ad Tech
US President Donald Trump
(Bloomberg) — US President Donald Trump threatened a probe that could prompt fresh tariffs in response to the European Union fining Alphabet Inc.’s Google over findings the company abused its dominance by giving its own ad exchanges a competitive advantage.
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The president made his warning in a social media post Friday after the EU announced it was fining Google almost €3 billion ($3.5 billion) and ordering the search giant to stop favoring 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 said. “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 criticized 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 European Commission said 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 in a statement. “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 totaled €2.95 billion, ranks among Brussels’ toughest sanctions and is the second highest by the EU against Google for alleged abuses of dominance. It follows a €4.125 billion Android penalty and a €2.42 billion fine for crushing shopping search rivals. A €1.49 billion AdSense levy was annulled last year. The decisions push Google’s EU liabilities to just shy of €10 billion — far outpacing fines against Apple, Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
The Mountain View, California-based company is No. 1 in the $757.5 billion global digital ad market, according to 2025 estimates by research firm EMarketer. In total, worldwide, Google is expected to pull in $205.04 billion in digital ad revenue in 2025. Most of that, $171.72 billion, comes from Google’s global search advertising business. The remaining $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 “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.
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 Sept. 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 in her statement.
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 favored its own ad exchange program 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 €8 billion across three different cases, although one penalty was annulled and another cut by EU judges.
–With assistance from Davey Alba, Leah Nylen and Kate Sullivan.
