Donald Trump’s decision to slap tariffs on countries that have shown support for Greenland is pushing transatlantic relations to a breaking point as EU leaders contemplate ways of retaliating against Washington that until now have been unthinkable.
One option being floated by centrist and left-wing politicians is for Europe to wheel out its Anti-Coercion Instrument, the EU’s so-called trade “bazooka” — a powerful retaliation tool that was originally conceived to fend off bullying from China, which would allow Europe to impose tariffs and investment limits against offending nations.
French President Emmanuel Macron has joined those calling for the instrument to be deployed against the U.S.
You don’t even need to ban it. You just need to open up the marketplace to alternatives. Cory Doctrow has been pushing the idea that the best retaliation is to simply repeal anti-circumvention laws and allow companies to begin chipping away at the walled gardens of the tech giants. For example, John Deere famously puts software locks on its tractors so that even simple repairs require the owner to pay for a technician to come out and “authorize” the newly installed part or else the machine will refuse to start. This system could almost certainly be bypassed, but right now the law not only allows manufacturers to lock their tractors, it also forbids anyone else from unlocking them. If the EU simply repealed the law that bans circumvention then some clever EU citizen could legally reverse engineer the software running on those tractors and start a business selling unlocking software. They could make it a one-time purchase at 10x the cost of an official tech visit and make money hand over fist while still saving their customers time and money in the long term.
And of course it’s not just tractors. Make a third party app store for the iphone that charges half the commission of Apple. Make a tool that allows seamless account migration from Google to the independent cloud provider of your choice. A huge amount of corporate rent seeking is enabled by anti-circumvention laws.
That’s a fair point, but with software platforms, I don’t think you can make a seamless migration tool without Google’s cooperation. And there a lot of roadblocks and malicious compliance type strategies that US oligarchic institutions can adopt. There is also the issue of monopoly-like network effects.
Considering their administration’s behaviour and the current course of American society, I think it’s better to make a permanent break with US. I do not think they will be able to address corruption and criminality. Even if the centre-right comes to power, it will be some variant of Obama, perhaps competent, but with zero desire to reign in corruption, oligarchs and prosecute criminals. Just like Obama refused to prosecute the financial industry oligarchs, a hypothetical centre-right leader won’t address Meta’s $16 billion raised via conscious enablement of fraud.
Then there will be another election, they’ll seed in some more propaganda about “freedom” and “destruction of America” and you’ll have JD Vance elected or perhaps someone even far worse than Vance or Trump.
To hell with that.
I’ve lived in the US for several years and travelled extensively, I feel confident in what I am saying. A large portion of American society is obsessed with ostentatious posturing about how they are the biggest supporters of “freedom” in the world (and similar self-aggrandizing polemics), that they cannot be engaged with in good faith.