Trump's Techno-Fetish

As TechLeadHD says, the only export the EU has is regulations. These regulations are a massive burden on US tech companies. Trump vowed to protect US companies. Trump’s posturing with the EU (and dangling of aid to Ukraine) is partially about weakening these regulations. Beyond this, other factors are at play (not covered here):

1. Re-arming the EU for more defense against Russia

2. Re-arming the EU so the US can shift focus to the Pacific

Below we narrow focus to EU regulations.

1. How big is the EU regulatory thicket?

A few headline numbers just on volume:

• Number of pages of key EU digital laws targeting online services (GDPR, DMA, DSA, AI Act, Data Act, etc.) went from 27 pages in 2015 to 931 pages in 2024.(CCIA)

• For a single large U.S. online service provider, the average annual cost of complying with this bundle of EU digital legislation is about $430 million per company, roughly $2.2 billion per year across the five biggest U.S. tech firms.(CCIA)

So from a U.S. perspective: that’s hundreds of millions per company, every year, just to play by Brussels’ rules.

2. Direct compliance costs: GDPR, DMA, DSA

GDPR (privacy law)

• A PwC survey found 88% of global companies say GDPR compliance alone costs them more than $1 million per year, and 40% spend more than $10 million annually on it.(PwC)

• An FTC-cited study estimated annual GDPR compliance costs around $1.7M for small firms and up to $70M for large enterprises when the regulation came into force.(Usercentrics)

• Average GDPR fines in 2024 were about €2.8 million each, with maximum penalties up to €20 million or 4% of global turnover.(Usercentrics)

For a big U.S. platform, GDPR isn’t a one-off project; it’s a recurring 8-figure line item plus constant tail-risk of multi-hundred-million-euro fines.

DMA (Digital Markets Act)

From the CCIA/LAMA economic study:

• DMA alone: about $200M per year per large U.S. tech company in compliance costs.(CCIA)

• Meta reportedly spent around 590,000 engineering hours on DMA compliance by early 2024, before the rules were even fully bedded in.(CCIA)

• Maximum fine for DMA violations: up to 10% of global turnover, 20% for repeat offenses.(Consilium)

So the model is:

huge up-front re-architecture + permanent recurring spend + “nuclear” fine authority based on global revenue.

DSA (Digital Services Act)

Same study for DSA compliance:

• ~$150M per year per big U.S. firm (average) for DSA.(CCIA)

• That breaks down into:

  • ~$88.5M internal compliance staff,

  • ~$53.5M legal/consulting/auditing,

  • plus a supervisory fee averaging $8M per company per year, capped at 0.05% of worldwide profits but with room to rise.(CCIA)

• Fines can reach 6% of global turnover for DSA violations.(CCIA)

Again, the structure is “big fixed compliance cost + potentially massive variable penalty based on world-wide revenue”.

3. Fines & “de facto tariffs” on U.S. tech

From a defensive U.S. standpoint, the killer argument is that these rules are formally neutral but in practice hit U.S. firms almost exclusively.

GDPR targeting

• As of March 2025, total GDPR fines: €5.65B; €4.68B (83%) of that was paid by U.S. companies.(Center for Data Innovation)

• EU/EEA companies together account for only €529M (9%) of fines, and China about €360M (6%), largely one TikTok case.(Center for Data Innovation)

• Between 2021 and 2024, U.S. firms paid ~€1.15B per year in GDPR fines; €1.61B in 2023 alone.(Center for Data Innovation)

Given that U.S. exports only about 10% of the EU’s imported ICT services, if fines were proportional to trade volume you’d expect ~€570M, not €4.68B, on U.S. firms.(Center for Data Innovation) That discrepancy is exactly what U.S. “protectionism” arguments latch onto.

Overall digital-reg cost stack

CCIA’s 2025 study:

• EU digital regulations (GDPR + DMA + DSA + others) impose up to $97.6B annually on U.S. companies when you add:

  • $2.2B/year in direct compliance costs,

  • up to $62.5B/year in expected fines/penalties exposure,

  • about $32.9B/year in lost revenue from forced design changes and delayed launches.(CCIA)

ITIF then translates that into a trade-policy frame:

• In 2024, EU fines on American tech firms totalled $6.7B, about 20% of all tariff revenue the EU collected that year—so fines alone are functioning like a second tariff system.(ITIF)

That’s where the “de facto EU tariff system on U.S. tech” rhetoric comes from.

4. Design of the rules: who do they actually hit?

The complaint isn’t just the size of the bills; it’s that the criteria are engineered so that:

• DMA “gatekeeper” status initially applied to six firms, five of which are American (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft) and one Chinese (ByteDance); only later was a European firm (Booking.com) added.(ITIF)

• National Digital Services Taxes and other measures kick in only above revenue thresholds (e.g. €750M global, big EU digital-ad revenue), i.e., the profile of GAFA/M.(CCIA)

• Largest individual EU fines in competition/data-protection history—Google Android (€4.3B), Google Shopping (€2.4B), Apple music streaming (€1.8B), Meta GDPR (€1.2B)—are all against U.S. firms.(CCIA)

From a Brussels perspective, this is “we’re just regulating the biggest platforms.” From Washington’s perspective, it looks like: “you chose thresholds such that the ‘biggest platforms’ are almost entirely ours.”

5. Opportunity cost & why a U.S. president would care

The “America-first / protect U.S. tech” argument is ultimately about where those tens of billions would otherwise go:

• The CCIA report estimates that lower EU revenue growth caused by DMA/DSA alone could cumulate to $2.2 trillion in lost digital-services revenue by 2030 for the five big U.S. firms, and about $325B less R&D investment at their current R&D-to-revenue ratios.(CCIA)

• ITIF notes that a single €2.4B fine is roughly equal to Google’s entire capex on a major U.S. data center—i.e., each mega-fine is one less hyperscale facility, one less AI cluster, one less U.S. regional tech hub.(ITIF)

If you’re a U.S. administration thinking in geoeconomic and AI-race terms, you read that as:

“Brussels is effectively siphoning a slice of our tech sector’s capex & R&D into its own treasury and into compliance bureaucracy, while China gets a freer run.”

Thus:

• Anti-EU regulation = not blanket opposition to all rules, but resistance to this specific, asymmetric regulatory stack.

• “Protection of American tech” in that frame is less “let Google do anything” and more “we don’t want our champions paying a stealth 1–3.5% of global turnover as an EU ‘digital tax’ every year.”(CCIA)

6. Caveats (because this is all very weaponized)

A few important qualifiers:

• A lot of these stats come from industry-aligned or U.S.-aligned think tanks (CCIA, ITIF, Center for Data Innovation), which have a clear agenda pushing the “EU = protectionist regulator” narrative. Their numbers are useful but not neutral.

• The EU’s own stated goal is consumer protection, competition, and privacy, and many European and some U.S. scholars argue these regulations correct real abuses and may even benefit smaller American firms by constraining dominant platforms.(The George Mason Law Review)

• The question you’re asking is explicitly about the American protectionist reading, so I’ve leaned into that side; but intellectually it’s worth also reading the EU-side defenses for balance.