Greer, Carr commended for seeking fairness in EU treatment of US tech firms

By Tate Rosentreter
The Center Square

Public Policy Solutions sent a letter Friday to United States Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Greer and Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr commending both men for standing up to European Union countries’ mistreatment of American tech firms as the two fight for fairness and reciprocity.

Public Policy Solutions (PPS) co-founder and president Joe Grogan wrote in his organization’s letter to Greer and Carr that PPS appreciates both men’s “continued leadership” on issues relating to fair digital trade as well as their “efforts to strengthen American competitiveness in the digital economy.”

“We encourage you to use the tools at your disposal to drive meaningful change in the behavior of E.U. countries toward American tech companies,” Grogan wrote.

“With your continued focus on achieving true fairness and reciprocity, we can reset the balance of our digital trade relationships and ensure American tech leadership is determined by the innovation of our private sector, not the regulatory regimes of ostensible allies,” Grogan wrote.

With its letter, PPS hopes to show support for the USTR and the FCC as both groups work to accomplish fair treatment of American tech firms, as well as make clear to the EU that American civil society is no longer tolerant toward attacks on key engines of America’s economy.

Grogan outlined in the letter how the EU “under the euphemistic banner of ‘digital sovereignty’” has spent “the better part of a decade erecting a framework of non-tariff barriers aimed squarely at American technology and digital service providers to artificially rebalance digital markets to favor otherwise uncompetitive domestic firms.”

PPS is concerned about further disruption to the Transatlantic Alliance that may transpire as a result of what it says is the continued abuse of the US business sector.

In the letter, Grogan gave the EU’s Digital Markets Act as an example of the onslaught against American tech.

This act “has been aggressively deployed through baseless investigations and multi-million dollar fines targeting U.S. companies designated as so-called ‘gatekeepers’ – even when the European Commission concedes the very U.S. companies they’re targeting don’t meet the classification standards,” Grogan wrote.

The EU has “further run afoul of the spirit and letter of trade framework” by proposed changes to the Digital Networks Act that creates “a backdoor to new ‘network usage fees,’” with the fees “overwhelmingly” falling on American tech firms, Grogan wrote.

“American companies are routinely told they must accept Europe’s regulatory approach as the price of accessing European markets,” Grogan said. “Yet European firms operating in the United States continue to benefit from a level of market access and regulatory treatment that American companies increasingly do not receive abroad.”

An illustration of the “increasingly one-sided digital relationship Europe now expects from the United States” is found in the case of Deutsche Telekom (DT), the “German government-backed telecom giant that controls T-Mobile,” Grogan wrote.

Grogan called DT “one of the most aggressive corporate backers of this digital sovereignty agenda.”

“While seeking to deny American firms protections in Europe, T-Mobile and DT spent more than $11 million last year lobbying American policymakers to preserve the enormous regulatory restraint and open market access foreign companies enjoy within our shores,” Grogan said

This DT case coupled with other issues in the telecom sector caused Grogan to write that PPS’ concern “has only grown as European policymakers exported their digital regulatory model across the Western Hemisphere, encouraging others, including several of America’s closest trading partners, to adopt similar, punitive approaches toward U.S. firms.”

“Left unchecked, this trend risks normalizing a framework that systematically disadvantages U.S. innovators while benefiting foreign competitors and, increasingly, Chinese state-backed firms eager to fill the void,”

“President Trump has rightly made reciprocity a central principle of his administration’s trade policy,” Grogan wrote.

“The United States has long maintained one of the world’s most open and dynamic digital markets,” Grogan said. “But countries that respond to that openness with discriminatory treatment toward American firms should not assume their relationships with Washington will remain insulated.”

PPS released a report last year highlighting the “protectionist policies” advanced by the EU designed to “disadvantage U.S. companies in their digital markets.”

“The goal is an amorphous European digital sovereignty, achieved on the backs of U.S. companies and at the expense of their own people,” the report said.