 "Ken Paxton, Texas Attorney General")
By Josh Sisco
The tech bosses who’ve lined up to pay homage to Donald Trump may have found a common enemy in the European Union, but that won’t save them from legal enforcement on their home ground, according to one of the new president’s key allies.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in an interview with Bloomberg News that technology giants can’t expect a free pass in the US — even though cozying up to Trump at his swearing in ceremony and at Mar-a-Lago appeared to pay off last week when the president told the World Economic Forum in Davos that he sees the EU’s frequent fines against Silicon Valley as “a form of taxation.”
“Trump realises they are a big part of our economy. How they perform matters,” Paxton said in the interview on the sidelines of a conference in Brussels Thursday. “However, I don’t think that means we are just going to turn a blind eye to inappropriate activity by them, whether it’s antitrust, whether it’s censorship.”
Paxton gained a national reputation during the Biden Administration when he sued the White House over a variety of policies including immigration and abortion, as well as leading a case to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He also gained prominence in progressive circles through his antitrust and privacy cases against companies including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc.
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Paxton pointed to the rival social media platform supported by Trump, which he formed in 2022 after he was banned from Facebook and Twitter following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. “He’s sensitive to that because it happened to him and that’s why Truth Social was birthed” he said.
“I think he’ll take advantage of the tech companies all of a sudden having interest in having some participation,” Paxton said speaking on a panel earlier Thursday. “They are only interested because they saw the writing on the wall.”
Trump criticised the big tech platforms during his first term for suppressing conservative viewpoints and moved to crack down on them. His antitrust enforcers sued Google and Meta over their search and social media businesses. They also opened investigations of Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. that led to lawsuits under former President Joe Biden.
Trump’s recent coziness with the tech CEOs has raised questions whether Biden’s aggressive enforcement agenda will continue under Trump.
“What really matters are what are his actions, and we don’t know what those actions are yet,” Paxton said. “We can look back at his record, and it wasn’t as if he ever stopped the DOJ from looking into actions against big companies.”
Trump Appointee
Trump’s current appointee to head up the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Gail Slater, indicates that he won’t be soft on tech this time around either, said Roger Alford, a Notre Dame law professor who served in the first Trump DOJ, during the panel.
Regulators in Europe, though view Trump’s recent Davos comments with alarm.
The European Commission has fined Google, Apple, Meta and others billions of dollars in a slew of antitrust cases and is also investigating the companies for violations of its Digital Markets Act. Concerns were raised by conference attendees that Trump could retaliate against the bloc through tariffs or even pulling out of alliances such as NATO.
“There are of course concerns,” Benoit Coeuré, head of France’s competition enforcement agency said at the same conference, which was hosted by economist Cristina Caffarra. Caffarra has also consulted on Paxton’s antitrust case to break up Google’s advertising technology business.
Coeuré said Europe should avoid “having some kind of negotiation with the Trump administration case by case, one after another. Because if we fall in that trap, Europe will be stuck like a rabbit in the headlights.”
