1. 🇪🇸 SPAIN DEPLOYS AI TO SPY ON YOUR SPEECH

Spain’s government under Pedro Sánchez has launched HODIO, an AI-powered platform designed to monitor social media content and measure what authorities broadly define as “hate speech” and “polarization” online.

According to the European Conservative, the system, developed by a government agency under Spain’s Ministry of Inclusion, will conduct large-scale collection of social media posts, analyze them with algorithms, and produce public rankings naming which platforms allow the most “problematic” content to spread.

Legal experts and digital rights specialists are already warning that HODIO amounts to “a large-scale surveillance mechanism allowing political power to constantly monitor the climate of opinion online.”

With this and the EU’s Digital Services Act, American companies are being forced to further comply with the EU’s regulatory overreach.

2. 💰NEW REPORT REVEALS THE STAGGERING COST OF EUROPE’S REGULATORY CRUSADE AGAINST AMERICAN BUSINESS

As Brussels continues to aggressively push its regulatory agenda, a new antitrust enforcement report has revealed just how imbalanced the transatlantic relationship has become, and that the EU has no plans of slowing down.

Nowhere is this asymmetry more evident than in the Commission’s handling of dominance investigations. Just last year, the European Commission recorded the highest number of abuse of dominance fines of any authority worldwide, while U.S. regulators didn’t impose a single fine. Moreover, of the $7.7 billion in global antitrust fines issued last year, a staggering $7 billion were handed down by Europe – most of which were directed at American companies.

Worse yet, the EU is ramping up these fines as time goes on. Over the past three years, for example, EU enforcement has only increased, with fines rising from $589.8 million in 2023 to $2.3 billion in 2024, and $2.5 billion in 2025.

As Brussels recently discovered, however, American companies aren’t the only ones feeling the pain on account of their regulatory approach. Rather, many of these costs have ultimately flowed down to European businesses and consumers in the form of higher prices as more and more U.S. companies have simply passed off the additional fees to their European customers.

With the Trump Administration continued backing American companies through its opposition to the Digital Markets Act and other onerous EU regulations, the EU would be wise to scale back – not escalate – its regulatory agenda, and avoid a deepening of transatlantic tensions which European customers and businesses are increasingly bearing the brunt of.

⚡ EU’S SUSTAINABILITY DIRECTIVES THREATEN AMERICAN ENERGY DOMINANCE

A retired US Army Brigadier General and former deputy US military representative to NATO is sounding the alarm in a new op-ed, arguing that the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) is a direct threat to American energy dominance.

Writing in Energy Intelligence, John Adams warns that the directive “injects additional compliance and liability considerations into that equation, potentially complicating an otherwise promising trade and strategic relationship.”

The EU has continued to expand its regulatory regime over the past several years, making it more difficult for American companies to operate. Adams makes it clear: “Europe cannot credibly seek expanded energy trade with the US while simultaneously increasing legal exposure for the firms expected to supply that energy.”