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European customers currently see few options that can achieve feature parity with Microsoft’s software suite, he said. “If you want to migrate from Excel to Google Sheets…, you will have months and months of projects going on just to replace the macros in Excel. So how doable is it?” Maisto said. “You can impose tariffs if there is an alternative — if you want to hit the market to privilege another – but there is no other one.”
Ambiguity could be strategic
Because the instrument has not been used before, it’s unclear how the measures would be applied in practice — or how far the EU would be willing to push. The ambiguity could be beneficial to the Commission, according to Geraets. “This is precisely the deterrent effect that the EU intends to have with this,” he said. “It’s relatively unknown at this stage, I would say, as to how far this could go.”
The level of retaliation would depend on the nature and extent of damage caused by an example of economic coercion. Exactly how the EU would determine what constitutes an appropriate response is unclear.
