The EU will not rip up its tech rules in an attempt to reach a trade deal with Donald Trump, the bloc’s most senior official on digital policy has said.
Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission vice-president responsible for tech sovereignty, indicated the EU was not going to compromise on its digital rulebook to reach an agreement on trade with the US – a key demand of Trump administration officials.
“We are very committed to our rules when it comes to the digital world,” Virkkunen said in an interview with European newspapers, including the Guardian. “We want to make sure that our digital environment in the European Union … that it is fair and it’s safe and it’s also democratic.”
She gently pushed back at suggestions that EU digital regulations could be considered trade barriers, saying the same rules applied to all companies, whether European, American or Chinese. “We are not specially targeting certain companies, but we have this risk-based approach in all our rules.”
In recent days, Trump’s senior trade adviser, Peter Navarro, has claimed the EU was using “lawfare” against the US’s largest tech firms, in an FT article featuring a litany of complaints against supposed “non-tariff weapons”. The Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has accused the EU of “institutionalising censorship”, while Trump has attacked European decisions to impose fines and pursue anti-trust investigations into the likes of Apple and Facebook.
Referring to the EU’s digital rules, Virkkunen said US tech firms often had greater obligations, because they were among the biggest companies on the market: “When you are a bigger player, then there are more obligations, because you are posing a bigger risk.”
She was speaking the morning after Trump announced a whiplash-inducing 90-day pause on many tariffs, but before the commission announced a matching freeze in its retaliation. The EU still faces 10% tariffs, as well as 25% duties on cars and metals entering the US.
Welcoming the US decision on “reciprocal” tariffs, she said: “We want to have a good trade agreement with the USA and we don’t want to have a trade war.”
While the commission has said that all retaliatory options remain on the table if trade talks fail, Virkkunen declined to “speculate” about possible EU actions against US tech companies. France has led calls to consider measures against US tech firms in response to tariffs on European goods. Virkkunen said “different options” for retaliation had been prepared in consultation with member states.
Virkkunen, a former Finnish government minister and MEP, took up her post at the commission last December, having been given a sprawling brief covering “tech sovereignty” as well as overseeing security and border control policies, and protecting European democracy from disinformation.
One of the most highly charged issues on her plate is overseeing investigations into big tech firms under the EU’s new digital rules. The commission is investigating firms including Alphabet, Apple and Meta under the Digital Markets Act, which is intended to ensure big tech does not crowd out smaller rivals in the marketplace. Separately, via the Digital Services Act, which is designed to counter online harms, it is running investigations into firms including X and Meta.
Risking a further falling-out with the US, in March the commission pushed ahead with enforcement action against Apple and Alphabet, the owner of Google, accusing them of breaking the DMA with anti-competitive behaviour.
Asked about reports that the commission could fine X more than $1bn (£770m), she said: “Our goal in these investigations and proceedings is not to impose big fines. Our goal is to make sure that all the companies are complying with our rules.”
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Virkkunen, a member of the transnational European People’s party, stressed her wish to ensure Europe’s digital rules were not too cumbersome for small businesses, amid rising concern about Europe’s anaemic economic growth in comparison with the US and China, which are also far more advanced in artificial intelligence technologies. “We are lagging very much behind because 80% of our technology is coming outside of the European Union, so there’s a lot of work ahead of us,” she said.
This week, she outlined a strategy to create up to five AI gigafactories, sites equipped with vast supercomputers to test and develop AI models in the EU. But her openness to consider revising the EU’s landmark AI legislation has also rung alarm bells among consumer groups. She said: “We want to implement the AI Act in a very innovation-friendly manner, and we really want to support our SMEs and our AI developers to comply with the rules.”
The EU’s AI Act has sparked deep concerns from writers, musicians and other creatives, who say they have no protection for their copyright from big tech’s generative AI systems, which draw on droves of books, newspapers, songs and images to feed their databases. In a tacit acknowledgment that there could be a gap, Virkkunen said: “It looks that now further steps have to be taken here.”
She added: “I think it’s important that we find a good solution … [to] support our copyright holders and all the right-holders and the creative industry to give their content for AI training and for AI purposes. At the same time, they also have to get fair compensation for that. But I see that it’s also problematic if European content is not used for training AI.”
The commission, she said, was examining “how we could support different licensing models … to make sure that we have good balance here”.
