The European Commission has hit Google with two fines totaling $1 billion for breaking digital antitrust regulations. What egregious sin did the tech giant commit to warrant such hefty fees? Setting up the Google search engine and Google Play Store to encourage consumers to purchase Google’s services, which the European Commission says violates the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The Commission alleges that Google unfairly promoted its own shopping, hotel, transport, and sports services in search results while limiting other app developers’ ability to advertise and complete purchases outside Google Play. Google now must take steps to “treat third-party services that feature on Google’s search results in a fair and non-discriminatory manner” and allow app developers to distribute their apps via the Google Play Store “both technically and contractually, to freely communicate, promote offers and conclude contracts with users not only within but also outside the Google Play app store.”

“Google has fallen short of effective compliance with the Digital Markets Act, and today we have taken decisive yet balanced enforcement action sanctioning these breaches,” Teresa Ribera, executive vice president for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition, said in the European Commission’s press release.

The DMA, which became applicable in May 2023, intends to “make the markets in the digital sector fairer and more contestable.” It tries to do so by requiring “large digital platforms providing so called core platform services, such as online search engines, app stores, messenger services,” to comply with a comprehensive list of regulations. These include forcing these firms to allow users to access the data they generate and prohibiting them from favoring their own product (which Google was fined for). The DMA was written with 19 companies in mind, of which 16 are American.

“The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine,” Ribera added. “And European consumers have a right to be told by app developers where to sign up to the best offers, even when the app store owner does not get a cut. This is the promise of the DMA, protecting fairness, choice and innovation in digital markets for the benefit of all European citizens.”

This is the latest fine in the European Union’s decades-long clampdown on American Big Tech. Last year, the E.U. fined Apple 500 million euros (about $569 million today) and Meta 200 million euros (about $227 million today) under the same antitrust law. Google has borne the brunt of DMA enforcement, having recently lost an appeal over a record $4.5 billion antitrust fine for allegedly thwarting competition through Android’s dominance. The latest penalties bring the value of European Commission fines against Google to almost $12 billion over nearly two decades, according to Reuters.

While the fines are bad news for Google, they are also bad news for consumers worldwide, who may soon feel the effects of tariffs imposed by the United States.

President Donald Trump has previously threatened tariffs and other retaliatory measures in response to European regulations and fines, especially for those that his administration considers discriminatory toward American companies. A 2025 White House memorandum states that if a foreign government “imposes a fine, penalty, tax, or other burden” that is “discriminatory” or “disproportionate,” the Trump administration “will act, imposing tariffs and taking such other responsive actions necessary to mitigate the harm to the United States and to repair any resulting imbalance.”

The imposition of retaliatory tariffs would hurt American consumers too, and would do little to dissuade the regulatory zealots in Brussels from going after American tech companies for operating their companies as they see fit.

The question of why the European Commission consistently punishes tech companies speaks to the nature of Europe’s adversarial attitude toward Big Tech. “Whether offline or online, fear, and greed, lead big and powerful companies to want more power,” Margrethe Vestager, then the European Commission’s competition chief, declared in 2024. She accused large digital platforms of becoming “the player and the referee” and turning the online economy into “the realm of the big few.”

This tech-hostile attitude was seen in the most recent round of fines against Google. It is no wonder that successful and innovative tech companies choose not to base themselves in Europe.

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Less than a week after United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the final design of the new $1 coin featuring the face of President Donald Trump, a federal lawsuit in Oregon challenging the coin’s production has been voluntarily dismissed. The controversial coin is scheduled for release this fall. 

Plans for the gold-plated coin include the presidential seal and “250” etched on one side, plus a portrait of Trump with the words “liberty” and “in God we trust” on the other. The coin, which is being minted to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary, is meant to “honor the enduring legacy of liberty and a lasting symbol of patriotism,” and “celebrate the strength of American values,” Bessent posted on social media.

However, critics argue the addition of Trump’s face not only breaks with long-standing norms against enshrining living persons on legal tender, but also violates federal law. 

Legislation passed by Congress in 1866 “expressly and unambiguously forbids” the production of a coin featuring “the image of a face of a living man” and is meant to prevent “officials from using currency as an instrument of political self-promotion,” according to court documents filed in federal court by James Rickher, a retired lawyer in Portland, Oregon. Known as the Thayer Amendment, the law was passed in reaction to former Treasury Department official Spencer Clark placing himself on banknotes intended to honor William Clark, of the famous Lewis and Clark exploration duo. 

Today, the statute grants the secretary of the Treasury the authority to “engrave and print United States currency” and states “only the portrait of a deceased individual may appear on United States currency and bonds.” However, proponents of the Trump coin argue the Thayer Amendment is limited to paper currency and instead point to a separate statute that governs the minting of coins and has no blanket prohibition on including the portrait of a living person. 

But the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 (CCCRA), which authorized the redesign of dollar coins “with designs emblematic of the United States semiquincentennial” to be produced only in the year 2026, does limit the design. The statute reads, in part, “no head and shoulders portrait or bust of any person, living or dead, and no portrait of a living person may be included in the design on the reverse of” the commemorative dollar coin. 

In response, the Treasury Department argued in court filings the correct interpretation of the statute only “limit[s] the prohibition [of a portrait of a living person] specifically to the reverse” or tails side of the coin. And since “the proposed design places President Trump’s portrait on the [head’s] side and an eagle on the reverse side,” there is no legal complication. And besides, the government’s lawyer argued, elsewhere in the statute the secretary is granted broad discretion over the designs of gold bullion and proof coins—coins that are still considered legal tender and official U.S. currency. 

Despite these many questions of statutory interpretation, Rickher filed to voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit on July 20 after being denied a preliminary injunction against the production of the coin in late June. The denial, written by U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, was due to Rickher’s lack of standing and inability to prove he would suffer a concrete or particularized harm should the coin be produced and distributed. Thus, Immergut did not rule on the merits of the case. 

Indeed, it could be that no one will have standing to challenge the coin in court until after the coin is produced and distributed. One scenario in which someone might prove injury and therefore have standing to sue, Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told NPR, is if a vendor or customer refused to accept the coin as legal tender. 

But even if the Trump administration were to win in court, however, this kind of leader worship and idolatry is deeply antithetical to American values. And whether such a coin is accepted or rejected is ultimately up to the American people today. After all, although former President Calvin Coolidge was able to move forward with his controversial and heavily criticized coin depicting him alongside former President George Washington on the half-dollar in celebration of America’s 150th anniversary, the decision was largely regarded as a flop and resulted in 859,408 of the 1 million coins minted being returned and melted.

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Consider one of the biggest challenges facing American businesses in the midst of President Donald Trump’s global trade war: As of Thursday afternoon, no one knew what tariffs would be charged on which imports entering the country as soon as Friday morning.

Trump is no stranger to improvisational, make-it-up-as-you-go policy, but even by his standards, this is pretty ridiculous.

To understand the wild uncertainty facing American businesses this week, you have to back up a few months. In February, the Supreme Court struck down many of the tariffs Trump had imposed last year when it ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) did not grant presidents the power to impose tariffs. Trump responded by implementing a 10 percent “global tariff” via a different legal mechanism: Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.

But that law only allows for temporary tariffs that last a maximum of 150 days, unless Congress votes to extend them, which it has not. As a result, the tariffs Trump imposed in February will expire at midnight tonight.

The Trump administration had 150 days to provide some clarity and stability to American businesses that buy and sell things overseas. It did not do that.

“You’ll have to stay tuned, and you’re gonna be busy over the next few days,” U.S. Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer told The Wall Street Journal earlier this week when asked about the upcoming tariff deadline.

That’s, uh, not very helpful. The U.S. economy is not a reality show. The Trump administration should stop acting like it is.

On Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said an announcement about tariff rates would be coming later in the day. As of 4 p.m., however, no such announcement has been made. (It’s possible the White House is deliberately waiting until after the stock market closes, given how the market has reacted to previous tariff hikes.)

“How in the world does someone decide whether to expand their factory when they wake up in the morning and have no idea what the tariff on the materials they need will be?” Bryan Riley, director of the Free Trade Initiative at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, asked rhetorically in an email to Reason. “Or how many acres of crops to plant? Or how many workers to hire? Or how many Christmas toys to order?”

All good questions. Thursday did not get the same level of national media attention as Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariff announcements of April 2025. For good reason, the White House decided to avoid turning this latest bit of major tariff news into a spectacle.

But what happened on Thursday is in many ways even less defensible than what happened on Liberation Day. Trump’s trade policies are more unpopular and less successful than ever, but he seems determined to continue jerking American businesses around, with little warning and no regard for the uncertainty it is creating.

The chaos and uncertainty created by these new, last-minute tariff announcements ought to underscore the importance of having Congress, rather than one (highly mercurial) president, set American trade policy.

Studies show that the heightened level of uncertainty caused by Trump’s handling of the tariffs has harmed the economy. That is, of course, on top of the direct cost of the tariffs themselves, which have been a massive tax increase on Americans. Various estimates show that the Section 122 tariffs cost American businesses between $25 billion and $30 billion during the 150 days that they were in place.

No wonder the trade war and tariffs are unpopular—and getting more unpopular as time passes.

The post Lots of Trump's Tariffs Expire on Friday. It's Thursday Afternoon, and No One Knows What Will Replace Them. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Now that democratic socialism is having a moment, political figures who adhere to the ideology or belong to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are fielding questions about it. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who self-identifies as a socialist, is a savvy politician, and so he quite deliberately misrepresents the definition of socialism in order to make it seem benign and unobjectionable. He is doing this frequently enough—and consistently enough—that he may be succeeding in tricking a great number of people into accepting a nonsensical, discredited, and dangerous ideology.

He has help from comedian and political commentator Jon Stewart, who interviewed Mamdani on his podcast this week. Their conversation is incredibly characteristic of Mamdani’s approach to the socialism question. Stewart asks Mamdani to define democratic socialism, and gets this answer: “It means making the choice every day to fight for working people. It means you believe that everyone in your city deserves to live a dignified life, no matter how much money is in their pocket.”

This definition is similar to the one Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) offered in 2018: democratic participation in one’s economic dignity. But when she said this to MSNBC host Chris Hayes, he at least pushed back, since that’s a vague and pleasant-sounding sentiment that most people would fail to associate with socialism. Stewart, on the other hand, half-heartedly followed up with a joke about nationalizing the industries, and let Mamdani quip that he was here to seize the means of production of Stewart’s podcast. They have a laugh and moved on. Eventually, Mamdani said this:

If you and I were to introduce the idea of a building that lends out books for free, we would be slandered in the same way that so many new ideas are slandered today, and yet that’s the library. The same thing with the fire department, the same thing with public schools.

So what he’s basically saying is: Socialism is just, you know, having a library.

This is all completely ridiculous. If a government provides some public services, this does not mean the government is socialist. Socialism should not be defined as maintaining a slightly more generous welfare state. Socialism is a political and economic system in which the means of production are owned in theory by the workers themselves rather than fat-cat capitalists. In actually existing socialist systems, the means of production is owned or at least controlled by a powerful central government with sweeping powers to allocate resources, set prices, and determine who does what. The strictly two-class system—workers and capitalists—envisioned by socialist theorist Karl Marx in the 19th century does not really exist, as there is no clear distinction between the two. In the modern economy, the relevant factor is public vs. private. Socialist governance is characterized by the hollowing out of the private sector and sharply limiting the free market in favor of top-down, centralized control of the economy—often via the nondemocratic aspects of the state such as regulatory bureaucracies.

It’s not as if the DSA really denies that this is their agenda: replacing capitalism and the free market with a system of government control. The program of the DSA calls for the end of capitalism quite explicitly. Their documents assert that their enemies are “the entire system of global capital” and that the U.S. Constitution must be scrapped entirely in order to create a “democratic socialist republic.”

And while Mamdani studiously avoids praising socialist and communist dictators, other figures in his orbit are not so careful. Darializa Avila Chevalier, for instance, has previously tweeted favorably about the Soviets, Fidel Castro, and Mao Zedong. Hasan Piker recently dressed in a uniform quite reminiscent of communist dictators.

When one considers recent developments within the DSA, none of this is really surprising. At its birth in 1982, the DSA’s bylaws implicitly excluded communists, per the wishes of founder Michael Harrington. But in recent years, the organization has begun to welcome communists, according to The Atlantic‘s Jonathan Chait.

When asked whether he’s comfortable sharing a movement with people who harbor more radical views, Mamdani quipped that he’s never met two socialists who agree on everything. That’s a diplomatic way of admitting that he does not want to exclude communist influences. Quite obviously, he doesn’t. He’s working tirelessly to get Avila Chevalier elected to Congress.

In the future, when commentators have a chance to grill self-described socialists on their views, they should not let them get away with saying that socialism just means more libraries. The DSA’s handbook calls for eliminating capitalism—the economic system of every modern, prosperous, and free country on Earth—and replacing it with a command-and-control economy. It does not meekly suggest that we make the welfare state a bit larger.

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This Week on Free Media

I made a version of this same argument on Free Media this week; watch it here.

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Worth Watching

I saw The Odyssey! My verdict is: great at some points, boring at other points, overall meh. Watch me and Christian Britschgi review it on this week’s episode of Freed Up.

The post Zohran Mamdani Tells Jon Stewart Socialism Is Just Having a Library appeared first on Reason.com.

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This week on Freed Up, the conversation starts with Robby and Christian’s reviews of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, including why Agamemnon stands out and whether Robby may finally be wrong about a movie. The hosts also dig into the parts of The Odyssey that felt perhaps too modern. Then they pivot to Nolan’s action scenes and why they sometimes fall short.

Later, they discuss Citizen Vigilante, the New York City mayor’s comments about arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Democratic Socialists of America’s increasing embrace of communist ideas. The episode closes with a broader debate over why socialism has failed historically and what Michigan Democrats seem to be getting wrong.

0:00—The Odyssey reviews are in!

4:40—Agamemnon is so cool.

10:35—Is Robby wrong for the first time?

19:03—The modern parts of The Odyssey

27:01—Nolan’s action scenes leave something to be desired.

35:10—Citizen Vigilante

42:00—The mayor of NYC is not going to arrest a leader of an allied nation.

48:57—DSA becoming more and more communist by the day

54:10—Socialism has never worked.

1:03:50—The Democrats in Michigan are confused.

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With federal crackdowns on Big Tech in vogue, a bipartisan bill is floating in the halls of Congress that would stymie innovation and hurt American competition abroad.

On Wednesday, the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade held a hearing on the App Store Freedom Act (ASFA).

Introduced by Reps. Kat Cammack (R–Fla.) and Lori Trahan (D–Mass.), ASFA would mandate that Apple and Google allow side-loading—the ability to download third-party app stores and apps—on iOS and Android and prohibit them from conditioning developers’ respective access to the App Store and Play Store on the exclusive use of their in-app payment systems or acceptance of most-favored-nation agreements. 

The bill also forces the companies to allow developers to direct users to third-party payment processors without paying fees—and to grant developers the same access to platform features as their own apps. It even forbids the companies from using nonpublic business information about apps to compete with those apps.  

ASFA marks a dramatic departure from existing antitrust and unfair competition laws, which are already more than able to provide substantial relief for these types of practices, as shown by courts’ prohibitions of certain anti-steering mechanisms in Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google. Indeed, unlike the Sherman Antitrust Act, the bill requires no demonstration of market power or dominance before its strictures apply. Moreover, its bans do not require plaintiffs to show anti-competitive harm or allow defendants the opportunity to present procompetitive justifications. 

Instead, ASFA closely mirrors the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) that is saddling leading American technology companies with costly compliance regimes as well as extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from them in fines. With other countries beginning to adopt their own versions of the DMA, implementing ASFA would undercut the U.S. government’s efforts to resist these discriminatory regimes; foreign nations would be right to point out that the U.S. has adopted the very competition policy it opposes abroad. 

When she introduced her bill last May, Cammack said it was intended to combat “higher prices and limited selections for consumers and anti-competitive practices for developers that have stifled innovation.” To characterize the App Store or the Play Store as expensive beggars belief: 95 percent of App Store and 97 percent of Play Store apps are free. To say that Apple and Google should offer payment options besides their native billing systems is like saying department stores should advertise to shoppers at the checkout counter that they can purchase directly from suppliers at a discount—in both cases, suppliers free ride off the downstream firm’s distribution services. 

Far from fleecing developers, Apple collected zero commission on 90 percent of the $1.4 trillion in App Store billings in 2025, and Google reports that 99 percent of developers are eligible for a fee of 15 percent or less on its Play Store. Considering the more than 2.3 million apps on the App Store and Play Store as well as the companies’ nearly $100 billion in combined research and development spending in 2025—evidence of the cutthroat competition between the two firms—it is hard to believe that they have “stifled innovation” in their app stores or broader digital ecosystems. 

As the bill seeks to solve a nonexistent problem, it would actively impede innovation. Federal courts have recognized that limitations on third-party app distribution, in-app payment requirements, and anti-steering practices can have procompetitive benefits. These benefits include recouping the costs associated with the billions that Apple and Google invest in their platforms, which ASFA’s provisions would jeopardize. Specifically, by enabling large developers—who pay the vast majority of app store commissions—to free ride off Apple’s and Google’s investments in their mobile platforms, the bill discourages the innovation that defines their inter-ecosystem competition and benefits consumers. 

ASFA is unlikely to become law, but, if it does, it risks compromising American technological leadership by chilling incentives to innovate and by importing a hostile antitrust framework that is being used to discriminate against American tech abroad.

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