The European Commission and its leading member countries have raised concerns about US technology firms for many years. The focus of their anxiety has been protecting the privacy of European citizens, ensuring consumer choices, and collecting taxes from profits made by US companies in Europe.

Recently, European leaders have claimed that Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and other US tech firms are so successful that they preclude challenges by European competitors.

Europe has now transitioned from voicing these fears to undertaking a frontal attack on US firms. The European Union’s proposed Digital Markets Act (DMA) contemplates extensive regulation of “gatekeeper” digital platforms (which we define later), scoped to include large US tech firms but few European competitors.

The goal is to confer competitive advantage on European digital firms, breaching the EU commitment to national treatment of foreign firms, violating their intellectual property rights, and imposing high expenses on the “gatekeepers.”

At the same time, France—with its longstanding antipathy toward giant US multinationals dating back to the economic nationalist campaign of JeanJacques Servan-Schreiber in the 1960s—is planning to enact its own steep barriers against US and other foreign cloud services. French officials have picked up the theme spreading in other countries, notably India and China, that only local firms can be “trusted” to handle and store data on their servers. The proposed French barriers disregard commitments made to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on national treatment and government procurement obligations.