Trump threatens extra tariffs, tech export bans, for any nation that dares to regulate Big Tech US president Donald Trump has threatened to impose extra tariffs on imports from any nation that dares to regulate American technology companies. Trump took to Truth Social on Monday evening to declare “As the President of the United States, I will stand up to Countries that attack our incredible American Tech Companies.” “ …
Tell Trump to fuck off and that any tariffs he imposes will be matched tit for tat by the EU. His approval rating is falling fast as the economy gets worse and inflation in certain sectors - especially in the grocery store - is spiraling. Yes it will hurt the people of the EU temporarily, but it will hurt the people of the US more and they need to be hurt. The Trump voters need to touch the hot stove long enough to realize that even though the "libs" they want to "own" are getting burned they are getting burned just as badly.
Trump is speedrunning us towards a dictatorship with his talk about troops in the streets of major American cities. We won't have a fair election in 2026 if he's able to normalize that. His approval needs to tank badly enough that republican congressman feel it is better for their re-election chances to break with him than to blindly support him. The only way that happens is if the economy gets bad enough here that his support craters. The US came to Europe's aid during WW II to protect you from the shackles of dictatorship. Now we need you to come to our aid!
Why should we match the tarriffs? Doesn't really matter. We don't import that much stuff from the US anyway.
Tax the techbro companies. And actually tax them and fine them to hell and back for breaches of GDPR, actually bring out the big guns (what was it, 4% of global turnover - not profit?).
As Gimli said "let him rot there".
Trump's tariffs are performative as a means to negotiation/intimidation.
It's unlikely he thinks they are a long term prospect. But they look good to a set of the American people and he can announce them with an understated "will take place in 30 days" knowing that the situation will change long before they have to be implemented.
"We don't import that much stuff from the US anyway."
True. A lot of "US Tech" never touches US shores. Mostly it's made in foreign countries and then shipped directly to other foreign countries. I'm sure many US companies either already or soon will have off-shore arms-length subsidiaries in foreign countries "buying" the foreign made US product and then selling to those other foreign countries and there won't be a thing Trump can do about it other than have another tantrum.
Matching another country's tariffs is not a punishment, it''s self harm. Trump is smacking himself in the face with tariffs, and the sensible response is to let him, not mimic him.
As it is, the UK is utterly dependent on American tech - from Google through to AMD, via Oracle and Microsoft (and Palantir if you're really lucky). We have almost no home-grown alternatives, and most of our public infrastructure depends on America to function, and most of our commercial online services. So we're not going to do a thing (regardless of the colour of the government).
Trump doesn't need to threaten us at all. Now go and buy something distracting from Amazon, pay with PayPal and watch Netflix, sucker.
Amazon: only after exhausting all other possibilities. Down to less than once per year. I used to use Amazon to find a third party supplier then look for that supplier's direct sale website. Now I go to those websites directly.
I do not use Paypal. I do not watch Netflix.
If you feel trapped in a subscription deal for entertainment try your local second hand shop. Good films and box sets go for a pittance.
Amazon is ok when, once a year, they offer you a month's free Prime, which you can use for video streaming (and, at least here, they even tell you where to go to cancel Prime the same day, then let the rest of the month ride out).
Only trouble is, I've done The Expanse twice, seen The Peripheral etc and this year can't spot anything worth the trouble.
Examples only. Consider Mastercard, Stripe, Visa - The vast majority of online and in person payments go through American companies (see the recent issues over censorship of online platforms by the payment networks).
And the point here is not what the politically engaged do, it's what the majority of people in the UK do. "We" spend twice as much on Amazon as the annual government budget for housing and community amenities.As individuals, we can protest as much as we like, it doesn't significantly shift our dependency on America, particularly in public services.
What is the EU *really* dependent on - i.e. stuff that would cost more if it the EU had a 50% or whatever tariff to match whatever Trump came up with?
Google? Nope, not a problem so long as you don't buy Pixel phones. Services like search ads aren't subject to tariffs. Actually Pixel phones are almost certainly made outside the US so those would be fine too.
AMD? Nope, while some of their CPUs are or soon will be made in the TSMC Arizona fabs there will always be plenty made in Taiwan. Dunno where their GPU boards are manufactured but you can bet it isn't the US. So no tariffs for you there either.
Same with Apple, you'll be buying iPhones/Macs/etc. made in China or India, not the US so no tariffs.
I think you see the point. Most of the stuff you buy from the "US" isn't actually made in the US, and services aren't subject to tariffs. The big place where it could hurt would be energy, particularly CNG to replace what you used to get from Russia. So carve out an exception for that. Just because Trump's tariffs would be blanket doesn't mean your reciprocal tariffs have to be.
"Tell Trump to fuck off and that any tariffs he imposes will be matched tit for tat by the EU."
No. He is harming his own economy. There's absolutely no sensible reason for anyone else to harm theirs in retaliation. It would only allow him to point to such tariffs as justification.
" especially in the grocery store
According to his latest ramblings, there is no inflation in the USA. Oil prices are at their lowest ever. Food prices are down. And, apparently "nuclear warming" is worse than climate change!!
All of the above seems to be the addled ramblings of a senile old man. The first 3 are true only in the sense that the rate of increase has lowered, not the actual prices. That last, well, WTF is nuclear warming? Did someone tell him the Sun is a nuclear reactor and this is his takeaway from that nugget of knowledge?
Indeed. The smart move would be to call the bluff. If he chickens out, problem solved. If he doesn't, we'll hurt but he'll hurt far more, and decoupling from US-based IT services will be really, really good for us in the medium/long term. We lack big high-end chip fabs? Sure, but ASML is Dutch.
The problem is that the EU is not a nation. It's a loose organization of 27 tiny-to-medium nations, that were waging war on each other until practically yesterday. It can't make any strong decision on foreign policy. It can barely prevent the 27 from wasting resources on screwing each other over. Every attempt to strengthen the EU is always met with fierce resistance by national governments. Until that changes, what we're seeing now is probably the best we can hope for.
>> We lack big high-end chip fabs? Sure, but ASML is Dutch.
Ha ha ha. Where have you been? ASML capitulated to the USA. It cut off some of its most valuable customers at the behest of the USA.
People need to understand, the USA is not our friend. It is time to treat it as not our friend.
You don't even need tariffs. Ban US tech companies from EU and EU government contracts, because, as they said under oath in France, they can't warrant data sovereignity.
Also, ban any data transfer to the US for the same very reason. It's clear US companies can't warrant GDPR compliance.
Break stores monopolies.
So to Make Europe Great Again we need to regulate US tech companies more, on ground of data privacy, security and sovereignity.
Enforce this seriously, without any dicussion, and the very same Big Tech will try to remove the Great Clown as soon as they can, as soon as they see it don't obtain what they want, but make things worse.
You can buy an RTX-5090 over the counter in a Chinese mall for less than the USA after sales tax. So yes, please ban sales to the UK so I can buy a cheap black market GPU.
You'd think after seizing a stake in Intel and ripping off NVida & AMD for 15% of GPU sales he'd want them to sell more products legally so he can get his cut but apparently not.
And when those four years are over all non-US competitors improved their products so well that US-products are inferior to those. History repeating. Again.
IT side specifically: Most stuff ist fast enough anyway and the improvements have slowed down a lot. Only special cases need more.
In the UK, the government is desperately propping up the vestiges of the steel industry after belatedly rediscovering its strategic importance. Steel was nationalised in 1949, denationalised in 1953, renationalised in 1967 and denationalised in 1988 (when it was making a modest profit) and subsequently declined as part of various conglomerates.
If you don't want to be subject to the whims of a hostile nation, being in control of your critical goods and services is a good idea in principle. However, that does require a commitment to manage those industries consistently over the long term and I don't really see the political consensus that would make that achievable in general.
IT is slightly more tractable: running IT operations in house would reduce the external dependencies without having to set up a rival superscale enterprise and would probably be broadly cost neutral. A few modest tax breaks might be all the encouragement required.
Good analogy there.
Unfortunately, like with steel, the seeds of our current problems go back decades - decades of taking the quick and easy option instead of the long term option. Convenience over long term security. The warning signs have been there, and many have pointed out the risks - yet here we are, we (I use the term loosely, and I would rather not be included in that - but am forced to use the stuff for work) have willingly led ourselves into a trap Microsoft has spent several decades building, ignoring illegal actions, ignoring blatant gerrymandering (OOXML as an ISO standard anyone ?), ignoring blatant lock-in engineering of products, and all the while patting ourselves on the back for having taken the easy option. To put the mindset in context, I've even seen statements like "we are behind industry targets for adoption of Microsoft Teams" - in what f***ed up world are there industry standard for locking yourself into a proprietary ecosystem that's designed to have no escape route ?
And just like we are finding with steel, when the penny clicked, it's both expensive and difficult to unravel the problems.
As an aside, the biggest problems with steel were laid down decades ago. The Chinese have been very astute over the years - making big investments around the world where "technology transfer" is part fo the deal. Making basic steel is not hard, or profitable - just chuck some ore (and/or recycled material) in a big pot with the right other stuff (reducing agent such as coke) and heat it up till the reducing agent reduces the ore to iron. Add in the right additives, you get steel.
The trick in in the finishing operations - the right amount of heating and cooling at the right rates. That's what differentiates specialist steels from commodity steel. That's where the profitable business is. But what did we do ? We told the rest of the world how we did it - so now they can do it too and we struggle to compete. And then after a decade or three we wake up and realise that we have a gap in strategic control of supply chains for essential materials.
Fuck MAGA...
Meta
Alphabet
Google (so bad they need to be named twice)
Apple
They can all afford to pay more taxes in each company they operate (whether they have an office there or not)
And each needs to be fined for the various harms they are the direct cause of
Not forgetting Microsoft
But what will the commentards here do?
Readership here has far more power to replace, avoid, and cancel US tech services than any other group, and far more than politicians actually do.
Less bluster and outrage, more action decoupling from the US. More effort implementing alternatives. More effort internally promoting non US tech within your organisations.
The orange ones threats to anyone who paints a target on themselves, are real and costly, but he has no way to stem a flood of customers steadily dropping one service after another.
Cancel USA starting today. Get on it folks.
From the article :
"“America, and American Technology Companies, are neither the ‘piggy bank’ nor the ‘doormat’ of the World any longer,” he added, before wrapping things up with a demand to “Show respect to America and our amazing Tech Companies or, consider the consequences!”"
Everyone pays for the goods or services. That is the reason the US tech companies are strong businesses with vast profits.
So how is it that every other country paying for US tech, means we are somehow taking advantage of US tech companies who make vast profits ?
Maybe a cynic would view this latest statement as the precursor for Trump to levy a tax on what we purchase from the US tech companies.
(it is only fair that the US is compensated for every other country exploiting the US tech companies by purchasing their goods.... /s)
These companies are latter day equivalents of the East India Company. They exist to loot. The idea that the looted can put a tax on them, i.e. be looted a bit less, means stealing profits or claiming sovereignty. Prepare to be locked up as a 'rebel' and a 'terrorist' for resisting these looters.
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He will just put out any old tat on his Twitter knock off to try and distract people from the Epstein files controversy won't he?
The big American tech companies would rather pay the digital service taxes to remain in the countries outside the US, than risk the orangutan coming along and threatening tariffs which might mean that other countries adopt more home grown tech and start to eat into the US tech companies share price.
Recent history suggests two possible outcomes: The world will try to negotiate with Washington about this matter and end up making modest concessions the president claims as a win, or nothing happens because Trump’s posts are often thought bubbles.
Nothing happens .... when more often than not Trump’s posts are thought bubbles revealing systemic global vulnerabilities and specific national weaknesses for universal adversarial exploitation and future competitive hostile force activity ‽‽‽
Oh please ..... you cannot be serious. It’s manna from heaven for all those alternative sources and foreign resources coveted and imagined ineffective and rendered powerless if subject to temporary trade sanction and/or tariff imposition attack.
Does Uncle Sam not realise nor recognise it is global financial and stock market system abuse and serious serial self harm, gravely to regarded and avoided at any cost because of the inevitable and suddenly arriving and unstoppable consequences which always naturally happen as a direct result of such crazy supported behaviour ??
Don’t they have any Special AIR Services* which dare to care and share the awarenesses for win wins rather than forever to be losing bankrupting fights for vainglorious nonsensical Pyrrhic victories?
* .... Special Advanced IntelAIgently Resourced Services
It is not as if such as be Special AIR Services are a deep and dark and unknown TS/SCI commodity not readily available, ..... and for considerably less than the many billions of dollars which are constantly invented, quantitatively eased into and squandered by current corrupted legacy systems promising secure defence for offensive operations, ..... from one of those new fangled and quantum entangling out of town, out of this world outfitters displaying exceptional awareness and surprising expertise in the genre, is it.
Or is that the case?
...... and although I didn’t say exactly ......
The choice is clear. Support reforms that protect American defense innovation, or watch foreign competitors systematically capture the technologies that should strengthen American military capabilities. ..... https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2025/8/27/commentary-on-sbir-reauthorization-defense-companies-getting-outplayed-on-contracts
......I do not disagree, and to the Noble and Bold Future Brave be IT Supremacy with AI Command with of Human Control, the Victors’ Spoils. Carpe diem... aut morere insatisfactus.
The Past is Dead and Long Gone and the Present is Best Accepted and Realised as an Old and Rapidly, Constantly Changing Version of a Future for Testing with the Remote Virtual Delivery of Vital Organic and Essential Existential Supplies.
So America refuses to enforce anything to make sure their big Tech companies pay any tax on home soil.
And any countries who try to even the playing field get the big guns of one of the worlds biggest economies pointed at them.
And America does not see themselves as the bully here?
> Most use legal-but-cynical schemes to minimize tax, which is why many nations devised digital services taxes and other measures to ensure Big Tech pays its share;
Apple and Google use blatantly illegal tax avoidance.
That they can avoid successful prosecutions, and bluff tax departments into not trying, does not make what they do legal, anymore than a drive by random shooting is legal because they can't catch the person who did it, or murdering my spouse in international waters is legal because I dropped the murder weapon and the body over the side so they can't get a conviction.
I wish people would stop parroting the "What we are doing is legal tax minimisation". It is not. Our tax department prosecutes (relentlessly) small people doing exactly the same things.
What they are doing is illegal. Structuring it behind a huge cross-border cloud of smoke, using tax havens, corrupt US presidents they pay bribes to, and using intimidation to get away with their crimes does not lessen the illegality one bit. In fact all of these things are explicitly illegal.
