Zuckerberg urges Trump to shield US tech from EU fines

Mark Zuckerberg used an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Friday to make a direct appeal to Donald Trump: the incoming US president should treat European antitrust penalties against American technology companies as the equivalent of tariffs and use the weight of the US government to stop them. The Meta chief executive framed the European Commission's enforcement of competition law as a strategic threat to American industrial leadership and argued that the outgoing Biden administration had not merely neglected to defend US companies but had actively undermined them.

The pitch to Trump on Rogan's podcast

Zuckerberg's appearance came days before Trump's inauguration and weeks after the president-elect himself sat for a three-hour conversation with Rogan in October. The Meta chief told Rogan he was optimistic about Trump's approach because "he just wants America to win". He presented the EU's antitrust enforcement as a structural disadvantage to the United States: "I think it's a strategic advantage for the United States that we have a lot of the strongest companies in the world, and I think it should be part of the U.S. strategy going forward to defend that."

The comparison to tariffs was deliberate. Zuckerberg said the European Commission's application of competition rules is "almost like a tariff" on American tech companies. He argued that if another country were "screwing with" a strategic US industry, Washington would find ways to apply pressure. Instead, he claimed, the Biden administration had "led the kind of attack against the companies, which then just made it so the EU is basically in all these other places, just free to just go to town on all the American companies and do whatever you want."

The $30 billion grievance and the €797 million fine

Zuckerberg put a number on the grievance: more than $30 billion in penalties paid by US tech companies to the EU over the past two decades. The most recent addition to that tally arrived in November 2024, when the European Commission fined Meta €797 million for breaching antitrust rules by imposing unfair trading conditions on advertising service providers through its Facebook Marketplace service. The Commission found that Meta tied its online classified ads service to its personal social network, giving it an advantage over competing classified ads providers.

That fine sits alongside a longer list of Commission decisions against US tech giants. Google has paid more than €8 billion across three separate antitrust decisions since 2017 covering its shopping service, Android operating system and AdSense advertising business. Apple was fined €1.8 billion in March 2024 for preventing music streaming developers from informing users of cheaper subscription options outside the App Store. Meta itself was fined €390 million in 2023 for GDPR violations related to the legal basis for behavioural advertising. The Commission's enforcement has accelerated since the Digital Markets Act entered into force in 2023, designating six firms, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft, as gatekeepers subject to specific obligations.

Zuckerberg's critique of the Biden administration

Zuckerberg's criticism of the outgoing administration was unsparing. He argued that the Biden White House had not only failed to push back against European enforcement but had pursued its own antitrust cases against US tech firms, notably the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit seeking to break up Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp and the Department of Justice's cases against Google's search and advertising technology dominance. In Zuckerberg's telling, this domestic pressure created a permission structure for Europe: once Washington signalled that the companies were legitimate targets, Brussels felt no constraint.

That reading of the transatlantic dynamic is contested. European officials have long insisted that their enforcement is based on evidence of market harm, not the nationality of the companies involved. Margrethe Vestager, the outgoing competition commissioner, repeatedly argued that the Commission targets dominant firms regardless of origin, pointing to cases against European firms such as the €1.06 billion fine on Qualcomm (a US company) and antitrust investigations into European energy and financial firms. The Commission also notes that US firms dominate the sectors, search, social networking, mobile operating systems, online advertising, where market concentration is highest.

Meta's policy pivot: fact-checking and DEI

Zuckerberg's podcast appearance came three days after Meta announced it would end its third-party fact-checking programme in the United States, replacing it with a community notes model similar to the one used on X. The company said the change reflected a changing "legal and policy landscape". On Friday, the same day as the podcast, Meta also confirmed it would terminate its diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. Both moves have been widely read as efforts to align with the incoming administration's priorities. Trump and his allies have long attacked fact-checking as a form of political censorship and have targeted corporate DEI programmes as discriminatory.

The timing is striking. Meta's fact-checking programme was introduced in 2016 after the platform was criticised for allowing misinformation to spread during the US presidential election. The community notes model, by contrast, relies on users adding context to posts rather than professional fact-checkers rating them. Critics argue the change will reduce the speed and accuracy of corrections, particularly during elections. Meta's own oversight board, an independent body funded by the company, said it was "concerned" by the decision and would review it. The DEI termination follows similar moves by companies including McDonald's, Walmart and Ford after conservative pressure campaigns.

What the Trump administration might do

Trump has not detailed a specific policy on EU tech regulation, but his first-term record offers clues. His administration imposed tariffs on European steel and aluminium in 2018 under Section 232 national security provisions and threatened tariffs on European cars. The US Trade Representative opened a Section 301 investigation into digital services taxes in France, Italy, Spain and other countries, eventually imposing and then suspending retaliatory tariffs. A similar tool could be used against EU antitrust fines if the administration decides they constitute a burden on US commerce.

Another lever is diplomatic pressure. The US-EU Trade and Technology Council, launched in 2021, was designed to align regulatory approaches. A Trump administration could use the forum to demand that the Commission coordinate enforcement actions with US authorities or face consequences in other areas of the relationship. Some Trump advisers have floated the idea of linking market access for European firms in the US to fair treatment of US firms in Europe. Whether any of this materialises will depend on the priorities of the new US Trade Representative and the National Economic Council.

Europe's likely response

European officials have been preparing for a more confrontational US approach. The Commission's new competition commissioner, Teresa Ribera, took office in December with a mandate to enforce the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act without political interference. The EU has also been building its own trade defence instruments, including the Anti-Coercion Instrument, which entered into force in 2023 and allows the EU to retaliate against economic pressure from third countries. If Washington treats antitrust fines as a trade dispute, Brussels could argue that the instrument applies.

There is also the question of unity among EU member states. France and Germany have generally supported vigorous enforcement against large platforms, seeing it as a way to create space for European competitors. But some smaller member states worry that a transatlantic trade war over tech regulation would hurt their economies. The Commission will need to keep the council aligned if it faces sustained US pressure. That task is complicated by the fact that several national competition authorities, in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, run their own parallel investigations into tech giants.

What happens next

The first concrete test will come when the Trump administration decides whether to continue, modify or drop the FTC and DOJ cases against Meta, Google, Amazon and Apple. If the new leadership at those agencies signals a retreat, Zuckerberg's calculation that the US government will switch from attacker to defender will look prescient. If the cases proceed, his appeal to Trump will have failed its first test. Meanwhile, the European Commission has several open DMA non-compliance investigations against Meta, Apple and Alphabet, with decisions expected in the first half of 2025. Fines under the DMA can reach 10 per cent of global annual turnover for a first breach and 20 per cent for repeated infringements. For Meta, 10 per cent of 2023 revenue would be roughly $13 billion.