Donald Trump Is Fighting for and Against Big Tech. How’s That Work?

• Donald Trump is threatening Europe on behalf of Big Tech.
• Donald Trump can also be telling Big Tech to observe its step.
• Does Trump imply each issues? Or possibly one factor at one time, and a distinct factor at one other? Maybe.

Fact: The Trump administration is fighting with European regulators, arguing that they’re too harsh on American tech firms.

Also a reality: The Trump administration says it is going to regulate American tech companies as a result of they’ve “too much power.”

That’s a complicated, however correct, abstract of the brand new administration’s relationship with Big Tech. On the one hand, it’s gearing up for a brawl with European lawmakers who’ve been punishing the likes of Apple, Google, and Meta for perceived antitrust violations. On the opposite, it’s warning Big Tech firms that will probably be expecting indicators that the platforms are behaving badly.

We obtained to see each side of that positioning final week, through two memos from the administration. On Thursday, Trump’s Federal Trade Commission introduced an “Inquiry on Tech Censorship,” aimed toward “technology platforms [that] deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations.”

Platformer’s Casey Newton speculates that the FTC’s effort “seems designed to unearth cherry-picked anecdotes that favor one political party,” and that appears proper to me. I will surely be shocked if the FTC spends lots of time wanting on the approach Twitter/X has shifted very far to the right under Elon Musk’s ownership.

But a day later, staff Trump additionally supplied Big Tech firms an opportunity at one thing they actually, really need: Relief from European regulation, within the type of a memo saying that the federal authorities shall be “defending American companies from extortion.”

The brief abstract of that one: Trump says he’ll threaten tariffs towards nations that use “taxes, fines, practices, and policies that foreign governments levy on American companies.”

Which occurs to be exactly what tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg, have been asking Trump to do (and why Zuckerberg and his Meta reps have been referring to European regulation as “almost like a tariff” for the previous few weeks).

One approach to have a look at the 2 completely different tech messages popping out of Trump’s White House may very well be a fundamental carrot and stick: We’ll combat the Europeans in your behalf — however you’d higher toe the road at residence.

But one other lens might merely be about completely different messages for various audiences: Trump tells the lads operating a number of the greatest firms on the earth — the ones lined up behind him at his inauguration — that he’ll work on their behalf. Meanwhile, his proxies inform Trump voters that they are maintaining the stress on Big Tech, similar to they promised. Like final month’s JD Vance interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation”, when the vp introduced that “we believe fundamentally that Big Tech does have too much power,” and that the businesses have to “stop engaging in censorship.”

As all the time, we’ll have to see what Trump et al truly do as a result of saying investigations and threatening tariffs are one factor — following up is one other. Seeing the place the administration places its vitality shall be telling.