Trump Administration Steps Up Pressure On EU Digital Laws

The State Department last week sent letters seeking “examples of government efforts to limit freedom of speech,” the Wall Street Journal reported. In particular, the letters target regulations under the DSA aimed at setting standards for how technology providers including Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta Platforms should police online content. According to an internal Department communication viewed by the Journal, the U.S. “is committed to shutting down the global censorship-industrial complex.”

The new State Department letter follows a similar missive sent in January by House Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) demanding a briefing from the European Commission on how it plans to enforce content moderation rules. “We write to express our serious concerns with how the DSA’s censorship provisions affect free speech in the United States,” the letter said.

The Commission disputed that characterization of the law. “The DSA is absolutely not a censorship tool,” a Commission spokesperson told the Journal. “To the opposite, freedom of expression is at the heart of the DSA.”

The Commission indicated last week that it is open to making “limited” changes to the AI Act. Partly as a result of U.S. pressure, the Code of Practice, intended as a guide for AI companies to complying with the act’s requirements, has already undergone significant changes during the drafting process to make it more industry-friendly. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has also launched a campaign to “simplify” compliance with EU technology regulations, including the DSA and AI Act.

Related: House Budget Bill’s Moratorium on State AI Laws Could Undo A Range of Tech Regs, Critics Say

Those efforts have attracted opposition from some members of the European Parliament. In March, Democratic Party MEP Brando Benifei, Parliament’s rapporteur for the AI Act, along with several other members, sent a letter to the Commission expressing “great concern” about changes to the Code “in which the assessment and mitigation of various risks to fundamental rights and democracy are now suddenly entirely voluntary for providers of general-purpose AI models with systemic risk.

“We, the co-legislators who negotiated the AI Act, stress that this was never the intention of the inter-institutional agreement.”

Last week, Benifei said the lawmakers were considering taking the Commission to court if the code ends up contradicting provisions in the law, MLex reported.

The Trump administration has been highly critical of the EU since taking office in January, particularly regarding regulatory steps the White House sees as disproportionately affecting U.S. companies.  “The European Union is in many ways nastier than China,” Trump said last week.

At the same time, the administration has grown close with U.S. technology companies. The CEOs of several U.S. AI companies, including those from OpenAI, Nvidia, and Google, as well as Elon Musk, accompanied Trump of his visit to the Persian Gulf last week, resulting in several deals between individual companies and Gulf State governments.

Such high-level engagement in other parts of the world is only likely to increase pressure on the EU to be more accommodating of U.S. technology companies.