Earlier this year, iRobot, the company that made the Roomba, filed for bankruptcy and was sold off to a Chinese supplier. The cause was a decision made in Brussels, three years ago, to block Amazon’s rescue offer. Thusly, an American company was regulated out of existence by a foreign bureaucracy. A Chinese competitor inherited the spoils, which is a fair summary of how the European Union’s (EU) so-called consumer protections work in the real world.

iRobot is no isolated case. The EU has built an entire regulatory architecture for precisely this purpose, with two pieces of legislation: the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA), marketed as consumer protection but functioning as industrial policy directed at firms headquartered in the United States.

In fact, five of the seven companies Brussels has designated as “gatekeepers” under the DMA are American. European competitors, on the other hand, are usually spared, and Chinese firms face notably lighter compliance pressure. It’s hardly an accident.

President Trump has so far been one of the very few Western leaders willing to spend political capital pushing back on this, and his administration’s opening move was instructive. Last July, at the President’s direction, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) launched a Section 301 investigation into Brazil over what Ambassador Jamieson Greer called Brasília’s “attacks on American social media companies,” alongside a longer catalogue of unfair tariff, anti-corruption, and market-access practices.

Brazil’s framework closely mirroring Brussels is a giveaway, since the European original is where the larger problem really originates.

PRECEDENT SET.

The administration deserves credit for using the Brazil case to put down a marker that digital protectionism dressed in regulatory clothing is still protectionism, and that Section 301 is the right tool for confronting it. The House Judiciary Committee even underscored that point in a letter to Brazil’s finance ministry, warning that the proposed competition bill would “mainly capture American platforms” and amount to a non-tariff trade barrier, with the same logic applying with even greater force across the Atlantic.

The U.S.-EU framework agreement signed last August included a polite commitment from both sides to address “unjustified digital trade barriers,” though that commitment has proven entirely one-sided. Brussels, so far, has offered no meaningful concessions, and EU competition chief Teresa Ribera has publicly declared the digital rulebook “not up for negotiation,” ludicrously characterizing American pressure as “blackmail.” European Commission officials have even signaled that 2026 will see enforcement escalate further, with landmark cases queued up against Google, Meta, Apple, and X, with a €120 million fine on X marking the start of greater enforcement.

THE ASYMMETRY.

The two-tier digital economy Brussels has constructed was always its intended outcome. Europe can’t build a competitive technology sector, so it built a regulatory one, and is now using that apparatus to distort markets.

The censorship dimension is, if anything, worse, since the DSA empowers Brussels to dictate how American platforms moderate content, including speech that is plainly lawful in the United States. The administration grasped the seriousness late last year when it imposed visa restrictions on former Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton and others, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio describing the targets as “leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex,” and that signal now requires substantive follow-through.

WHAT MUST FOLLOW.

Section 301 is the obvious next step, since the statute permits USTR, on Presidential direction, to investigate foreign acts that are “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable,” or “discriminatory” and burden U.S. commerce, all three of which the DMA and DSA meet comfortably.

A formal investigation would produce a record of how Brussels’ regulatory architecture functions as a trade barrier, test it against the framework commitments the EU is now openly ignoring, and generate genuine leverage, the one commodity polite diplomatic correspondence doesn’t produce on its own. As the Brazil case has already shown, the prospect of retaliatory tariffs concentrates minds in foreign capitals far more reliably than remonstration.

While that is the likely case, the U.S. could be forced to act even further if the EU does not roll back its DMA and digital services tax regulations, potentially even imposing similar restrictions on EU companies operating in the U.S., like Nokia, SAP, and DHL.

The Trump admin should keep pressing Brazil until its digital regime is meaningfully recalibrated, and it should open a parallel Section 301 case against the European Union without further delay, since the Brazilian bill was modeled on the European one. Closing down the imitation while leaving the source untouched would amount to a strategic half-measure of the sort Brussels, judging by its current posture, would happily exploit.

If the EU insists on writing American rules from a desk in Berlaymont, Washington has the tools to make them cost prohibitive. President Trump should use them without apology.