The EU must be prepared to walk away from a trade deal with the US if Donald Trump acts on his threats to target the bloc unless it waters down its digital legislation, Brussels’ competition tsar has said.
Teresa Ribera, the European Commission’s executive vice-president, called on the bloc to be “courageous” in response to threats from the US president and “to avoid the temptation of being subordinated to others’ interests”.
Ms Ribera said Brussels’ trade negotiators had been “nice” towards Washington in finalising a trade deal agreed late last month, and warned that the bloc should not accept any coercive moves by the US to water down the EU’s landmark tech laws, known as the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.
“We may be kind, polite, try to find ways to solve problems and discrepancies but we cannot accept whatever [they demand],” the EU’s competition commissioner told the Financial Times. “We cannot be subject to the will of a third country.”
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Ursula von der Leyen, Ms Ribera’s boss as president of the commission, has praised the trade deal struck with Mr Trump in Scotland in late July for providing “stability and predictability” for transatlantic relations.
But only days after Brussels and Washington outlined the full details of the agreement, Mr Trump this week threatened to impose tariff and export controls on countries whose taxes, rules or laws on tech companies “discriminate” against the US.
Spanish socialist Ms Ribera, who is second only to Ursula von der Leyen in the commission’s power structure, stressed it is the bloc’s sovereign right how it deals with its own regulation, including its digital rules.
The US had pressed for changes to the EU’s digital regulations as part of the trade talks, according to people involved.
“This is quite an obvious thing that we will defend,”Ms Ribera said. “So if we have got this general approach and there is this attempt to reopen things, of course the question is: ‘OK, there is no [trade] agreement then?’ We cannot play with our values just to accommodate the concerns of others”.
According to Ms Ribera, the EU “tried to be nice to see how we could recover a trustful relationship” with the US.
But if Mr Trump breaches that trust by using threats to demand lighter regulation of Big Tech, she said, “of course we have to stick to the very clear messages and limits that we tried to reflect since the very beginning. One of them is the recognition of our own capacity to protect the interests and the rights of our own consumers, of our own citizens.”
Mr Trump’s attack on digital rules and taxes coincides with Brussels having to decide how to proceed on a number of investigations into the activities of US tech companies, including Elon Musk’s X, Apple and Facebook owner Meta.
Ms Ribera said the EU would not hold back in carrying out these investigations and enforcing its landmark digital regulation because of Mr Trump’s threats.
American tech companies “are making great profits out of this market, but they are subject to the same laws and regulations than any other player, independently of where their headquarters are based”, she added.
Brussels on Thursday started to implement its part of the trade deal by moving to lower tariffs on a range of US imports, including cars and other industrial products. Member states and the European parliament will still have to approve them. If Washington were to impose new tariffs, the bloc can reassess those commitments.
Ms Ribera also questioned how the EU’s commitment to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on US energy products and weapons as part of the deal would work in practice.
“It’s not the European Commission who buys energy goods, it’s not the European Commission who gets the procurement of public defence goods. It is not even — in most cases — the member states who do that.” - Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
