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It's been two weeks since the Supreme Court blocked Donald Trump's emergency tariffs, but an estimated 300,000 US businesses still have no idea if or when they will receive refunds.
Economists have estimated that more than $175 billion was unlawfully collected, and the US could end up owing substantially more than that the longer that the refund process is dragged out, since the US must pay back daily interest on the funds. According to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, a conservative estimate showed that "$700 million in interest is added to the final bill every month that the government delays tariff refunds, or around $23 million per day."
The US is aware that interest is compounding daily on tariffs, as the Trump administration argued against an injunction that would've temporarily blocked the tariffs much sooner by noting that no one would be harmed, since tariffs would be repaid with interest if deemed unlawful. However, now that the court has ruled against tariffs, the Trump administration seems to be dragging its feet in finding a way to return all the ill-gotten funds.
Ed Brzytwa, vice president of international trade for the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), told Ars that delays seem counter to US interests at this point.
"The government should have an intrinsic interest in providing these new funds as fast as possible, so they don't owe more interest over time," Brzytwa said. Providing refunds sooner, he suggested, would not just benefit companies, but "to their employees, to the US economy, to US consumers, all the above."
For the tech industry, many popular products have been spared hundreds of billions in tariffs since Trump took office, but, as the CTA documented in repeated court filings, many more products were hit by them. Ahead of midterms, when analysts predict that tariff whipsawing might slow down, tech firms remain uncertain about when to expect refunds, experts told Ars. At a time when firms already feel overwhelmed, they're also navigating new tariffs that are raising new legal challenges, while risking more supply chain strains as additional threats of feared tariff stacking loom.
Pressure is increasing on Trump to deliver refunds faster; however, after a US Court of International Trade judge, Richard Eaton, ordered universal refunds for all importers who paid Trump's emergency tariffs on Wednesday. At a hearing that day, Eaton noted that Customs knows how to issue refunds, later ordering that all claims be efficiently resolved, CNBC reported.
Officials from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are expected to share an update on their proposed refund plans at a hearing Friday in that case, raised by Atmus Filtration, which reportedly paid about $11 million in unlawful tariffs.
In the meantime, the CTA and the Chamber of Commerce (CoC) filed a motion [PDF] to submit a proposed brief in another tariffs lawsuit outlining what the trade groups believe is the best strategy for handling refunds.
That lawsuit, raised by V.O.S. Selections, is being overseen by a different Court of International Trade judge, Gary Katzmann. The groups are hoping that he may agree with Eaton, who noted at the Wednesday hearing that "the agency should be able to program its system to issue refunds," CNBC reported. The trade groups' proposed brief emphasized that "in fact, CBP has already issued refunds for some of those tariffs because they were retroactively reduced by a subsequent trade agreement."
According to the trade groups, the US government has the technology to streamline—and possibly even automate—tariff refunds.
"They have the technology to do it," Brzytwa said. "They offer refunds to importers all the time."
But apparently, the Trump administration so far lacks the will to use it, instead planning to wait for court direction before taking any steps to send the funds back. So now the court must intervene to draft a blueprint that all businesses can use to secure a quick and easy refund, the groups said.
"There is no question that American businesses are now entitled to the return of the billions of dollars they were forced to pay under these unlawful tariffs," the groups wrote. "The law is clear on that point, and the government has repeatedly stated that it would issue refunds if the tariffs were ultimately deemed invalid."
If the court requires each business to either litigate their claims or go through "impractical" CBP administrative procedures to request refunds, either the courts or CBP will be overwhelmed, the groups argued. Dealing with the backlog could drag out refunds for years, while the interest accrues and the most vulnerable businesses risk being forced to shut down, they argued.
For many small firms with tight profit margins, the emergency tariffs "have already stretched their resources to the breaking point," groups wrote.
"Those are the types of companies that need to be prioritized in a refund plan," Brzytwa said. He suggested the court should require officials to take steps "to help the companies that barely are making it at this point because they paid such steep amounts in tariffs."
Perhaps even more concerning to the court, for any firms that end up negatively weighing the costs of a lengthy legal battle with the government against likely much smaller tariff refunds, some claims may be abandoned. That would, troublingly, leave taxes collected unlawfully under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in the Trump administration's hands, groups warned.
"There is no need to individually litigate whether particular IEEPA duties were valid—they are all invalid," the groups wrote. Instead, groups urged the court to "craft an injunction facilitating a streamlined administrative process for plaintiffs in this case to use in obtaining their refunds." That same process could become "a blueprint for other importers to secure refunds," they suggested.
Possibly, a "commonsense" court-ordered solution could be easily created to streamline refunds, groups proposed.
"Because the government has tracked the payment of IEEPA tariff duties, it knows who paid them and in what amounts, even without refund-seeking submissions from the affected importers," the groups said. Later on, they added, "this efficiency is important not only to reduce strain on courts and the government, but to ensure that refunds issue on a defined and predictable timeline. Delay should not become a de facto denial of recovery for importers who paid unlawful tariffs and wish to seek appropriate relief."
Dallas Dolen—a technology, media, and telecommunications leader for PwC, a leading global professional services network that advises big firms on tax questions—told Ars that he's also worried that tariff refund fights will drag on for years without a court-ordered pathway to expedite them.
Until courts clarify how the refund process will work, he said that PwC continues to advise companies to "be really organized, be really prepared." Every business impacted should stop now to assess what tariffs they expect they're owed and possibly hire staff to ensure they're prepared to secure a refund when processes are created, PwC advised. That level of preparedness may be critical, since "it's unlikely the government will write them two checks," Dolen said.
Dolen suggested that consumer technology might be the sector of the tech industry most hurt by tariffs, and even if refunds are automated, alternative tariffs that Trump is threatening to impose could change the calculus on refunds.
According to Dolen, some businesses required to pay new tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 may instead get a gross refund, possibly subtracting Trump's latest 10 percent global tariffs from the total of IEEPA tariffs owed.
Perhaps complicating the math further, those new tariffs could increase before refunds are issued. Just yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that Section 122 tariffs could be raised by another 15 percent this week, The New York Times reported. And over the next five months, the tech industry could be paying tariffs at the same levels as under Trump's IEEPA tariffs, Bessent has claimed.
However, Trump's tariffs remain hugely unpopular, even with Republicans. Both experts agreed that Trump will likely be more thoughtful about tariffs ahead of the midterms. And since he's unlikely to get much support from Congress members focused on reelection, any changes will likely come by executive order. Dolen suggested that Trump's concerns about inflation from tariffs may make him less willing to impose them.
Brzytwa told Ars that the CTA is also hoping that the back-to-back court rulings might push Trump to rethink his aggressive tariff strategy—especially given that his goals of increasing US manufacturing are not being achieved by them.
"This is a golden opportunity for them to reassess on whether they want to impose more tariffs, because if you impose more tariffs, you create more chaos, you create more uncertainty. and you raise costs again," Brzytwa said.
Another wrinkle is that the Supreme Court ruling has emboldened critics of Trump's tariffs. Although Trump and Bessent have postured that the Supreme Court ruling is meaningless, since they have other tariff avenues to explore, those will not replace his prior IEEPA tariffs, Brzytwa said. And the administration already is facing legal pressure that could gut the Section 122 authority to impose tariffs, after 20 states sued Trump to block his next go-to tariff tool.
But Trump seems unlikely to give up tariffs as a source of leverage in negotiations with all of America's trading partners, and sometimes even in negotiations with US companies. And even if Section 122 tariffs are one day blocked, just as IEEPA tariffs were, Brzytwa told Ars that CTA is "very closely" monitoring additional tariffs that could be imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act and Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. Those could hit products like semiconductors or critical minerals, as well as any downstream products containing them, perhaps further hurting cash-strapped tech firms stuck feeling fuzzy about what costs or supply chain disruption may come in the near future.
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Blogger Ben Werdmuller has discussed an article in Nature about the political impact of the algorithm(s) used by X (formerly known as Twitter). The gist is that the use of the algorithms against X's users tends to shift about 5% of them in a specific direction. That's more than enough to tip an election one way or another especially since the damage seems persistent and lasts even after exposure ceases.
Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
It should be added that the effect has already been seen in multiple countries. For example, the elections in Turkey were affected with outright censorship, within X. And the impact from the CPP's Bytedance's Tiktok is likely even more severe, not to mention multiple experiments in manipulation in Meta's properties like Facebook.
Journal Reference: Gauthier, G., Hodler, R., Widmer, P. et al. The political effects of X's feed algorithm. Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2
Previously:
(2026) How Screwed is Generation Alpha, and the Generations Which Will Depend on Them?
(2025) European Union Orders X to Hand Over Algorithm Documents
(2024) Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible
(2023) Utah Sues Tiktok For Getting Children 'Addicted' To Its Algorithm
(2022) Leaked Documents Reveal Instagram Was Pushing Girls Towards Content That Harmed Mental Health
(2022) Musk Buying Twitter Is Not About Freedom of Speech
... and more
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Forget about Discord - this proposed legislation in Colorado requires each OS user to have an age associated with it. I wonder if they're worried about children pretending to be adults, or adults pretending to be children.
-Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date or age of the user of that device to provide a signal regarding the user's age bracket (age signal) to applications available in a covered application store;
- Provide an application developer (developer) that requests an age signal, with respect to a particular user, the technical ability to call an age signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, the user's age-bracket data
- Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with the bill. An operating system provider shall not share an age signal with a third party for a purpose not required by the bill.
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/SB26-051
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Europe's $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard:
There's a reason every decentralized system eventually finds its way onto a platform: platforms solve real-world problems that platform users struggle to solve for themselves.
Everyone needs platforms: writers, social media users, people looking for a romantic partner. What's more, the world needs platforms. Say you want to connect all 200+ countries on Earth with high-speed fiber lines; you can run a cable from each country to every other country (about 21,000 cables, many of them expensively draped across the ocean floor), or you can pick one country (preferably one with both Atlantic and Pacific coasts) and run all your cables there, and then interconnect them.
That's America, the world's global fiber hub. The problem is, America isn't just a platform for fiber interconnections – it's a Great Power that uses its position at the center of the world's fiber networks to surveil and disrupt the world's communications networks.
That's a classic enshittification move on a geopolitical scale. It's not the only one America's made, either.
Consider the US dollar. The dollar is to global commerce what America's fiber head-ends are to the world's data network: a site of essential, (nominally) neutral interchange that is actually a weapon that the US uses to gain advantage over its allies and to punish its enemies:
The world's also got about 200 currencies. For parties in one country to trade with those in another country, the buyer needs to possess a currency the seller can readily spend. The problem is that setting up 21,000 pairwise exchange markets from every currency to every other currency is expensive and cumbersome – traders would have to amass reserves of hundreds of rarely used currencies, or they would have to construct long, brittle, expensive, high-risk chains that convert, say, Thai baht into Icelandic kroner to Brazilian reals and finally into Costa Rican colones.
Thanks to a bunch of complicated maneuvers following World War II, the world settled on the US dollar as its currency platform. Most important international transactions use "dollar clearing" (where goods are priced in USD irrespective of their country of origin) and buyers need only find someone who will convert their currency to dollars in order to buy food, oil, and other essentials.
There are two problems with this system. The first is that America has never treated the dollar as a neutral platform; rather, American leaders have found subtle, deniable ways to use "dollar dominance" to further America's geopolitical agenda, at the expense of other dollar users (you know, "enshittification"). The other problem is that America has become steadily less deniable and subtle in these machinations, finding all kinds of "exceptional circumstances" to use the dollar against dollar users.
America's unabashed dollar weaponization has been getting worse for years, but under Trump, the weaponized dollar has come to constitute an existential risk to the rest of the world, sending them scrambling for alternatives. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game that was rigged in his favor, but he still flipped over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all.
Once Trump tried to steal Greenland, it became apparent that the downsides of the dollar far outweigh its upsides. Last month, Christine Lagarde (president of the European Central Bank) made a public announcement on a radio show that Europe "urgently" needed to build its own payment system to avoid the American payment duopoly, Visa/Mastercard.
Now, there's plenty of reasons to want to avoid Visa/Mastercard, starting with cost: the companies have raised their prices by more than 40% since the pandemic started (needless to say, updating database entries has not gotten 40% more expensive since 2020). This allows two American companies to impose a tax on the entire global economy, collecting swipe fees and other commissions on $24t worth of the world's transactions every year.
But there's another reason to get shut of Visa/Mastercard: Trump controls them. He can order them to cut off payment processing for any individual or institution that displeases him. He's already done this to punish the International Criminal Court for issuing a genocide arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, and against a Brazilian judge for finding against the criminal dictator Jair Bolsonaro (Trump also threatened to have the judge in Bolsonaro's case assassinated). What's more, Visa/Mastercard have a record of billions (trillions?) of retail transactions taking place between non-Americans, which Trump's officials can access for surveillance purposes, or just to conduct commercial espionage to benefit American firms as a loyalty bonus for the companies that buy the most $TRUMP coins.
Two days after Lagarde's radio announcement, 13 European countries announced the formation of "EuroPA," an alliance that will facilitate regionwide transactions that bypass American payment processors (as well as Chinese processors like Alipay).
As European Business Magazine points out, EuroPA is the latest in a succession of attempts to build a European payments network.
There's Wero, a 2024 launch from the 16-country European Payments Initiative, which currently boasts 47m users and 1,100 banks in Belgium, France and Germany, who've spent €7.5b through the network.
Wero launched as a peer-to-peer payment system that used phone numbers as identifiers, but it expanded into retail at the end of last year, with several large retailers (such as Lidl) signing on to accept Wero payments.
Last week, Wero announced an alliance with EuroPA, making another 130m people eligible to use the service, which now covers 72% of the EU and Norway. They're rolling out international peer-to-peer payments in 2026, and retail/ecommerce payments in 2027.
These successes are all the more notable for the failures they follow, like Monnet (born 2008, died 2012). Even the EPI has been limping along since its founding, only finding a new vigor on the heels of Trump threatening EU member states with military force if he wasn't given Greenland.
[...] Network effects are pernicious, but not insurmountable. The EU is attacking this problem from multiple angles – not just through EuroPA, but also through the creation of the Digital Euro, a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Essentially, this would give any European who signs up an account with the ECB, the federal bank of the Eurozone. Then, using an app or a website, any two Digital Euro customers could transfer funds to one another using the bank's own ledgers, instantaneously and at zero cost.
EBM points out that there's a critical difficulty in getting EuroPA off the ground: because it is designed to be cheap to use, it doesn't offer participating banks the windfall profits that Visa/Mastercard enjoy, which might hold back investment in EuroPA infrastructure.
But banks are used to making small amounts of money from a lot of people, and with the Digital Euro offering a "public option," the private sector EuroPA system will have a competitor that pushes it to continuously improve its systems.
It's true that European payment processing has been slow and halting until now, but that was when European businesses, governments and households could still pretend that the dollar – and the payment processing companies that come along with it – was a neutral platform, and not a geopolitical adversary.
If there's one thing the EU has demonstrated over the past three years, it's that geopolitical threats from massive, heavily armed mad empires can break longstanding deadlocks. Remember: Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the end of Russian gas moved the EU's climate goals in ways that beggar belief: the region went from 15 years behind on its solar rollout to ten years ahead of schedule in just a handful of months.
This despite an all-out blitz from the fossil fuel lobby, one of the most powerful bodies in the history of civilization.
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... have you no sense of decency, sir?
(Attorney Joseph Welch, 1954 Army‑McCarthy hearings)
"The European Commission, in a comprehensive decade-long effort, has successfully pressured social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules, thereby directly infringing on Americans' online speech in the United States. Though often framed as combating so-called "hate speech" or "disinformation," the European Commission worked to censor true information and political speech about some of the most important policy debates in recent history—including the COVID-19 pandemic, mass migration, and transgender issues. After ten years, the European Commission has established sufficient control of global online speech to comprehensively suppress narratives that threaten the European Commission's power."
Thus opens a February 3 report [PDF] of the Committee on the Judiciary of the US House of Representatives.
The report is a long, long through-the-looking-glass argument against the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA), specifically its Code of Practice on Disinformation.
That DSA, goes the argument -- with a long list of screenshots of heavily redacted e-mails, and the occasional Fox News article as source -- has been used to gang-pressure a whole bunch of election campaigns in European countries: France (2024), the Netherlands (2023 & 2025), Slovakia (2023), Moldova (2024), Germany, Ireland (2024 & 2025), and Romania. Romania's 2024 presidential election is a particularly nasty example, with the EU and France pressuring Telegram and TikTok to block content associated with conservative candidate Călin Georgescu, despite the absence of evidence supporting allegations of Russian interference used to justify those actions (says the report). [Paywalled]
What the report also -- inadvertently -- highlights is how the European Union (and Australia, Japan, South-Korea and Canada) and the United States are diverging on the treatment of social media.
Out of the EU's 27 member states, 15 of them have a partial or complete ban on smartphone usage in schools in place. Nine EU countries -- Spain, Greece, France, Italy, Finland, Germany, Denmark, Austria and Portugal -- are currently discussing a ban on social media usage under a certain age (mostly around 15, 16): a debate driven by concerns about addiction, mental health impact, and the spread of harmful content.
South Korea has implemented a school‑wide phone‑ban since 2024 and is actively discussing, but has not yet legislated, a social‑media age limit for minors. Japan is considering age‑restriction policies and has a government‑led working group, but there is currently no legal ban on smartphones in schools nor a statutory social‑media age limit. In Canada, most provinces have mandatory school-wide bans, but there is no age limit being discussed (yet), while Australia has no ban on smartphone usage, but is the first to have a federal law barring under-16s of having accounts on major social media platforms.
Get 'em while they're young, I guess.
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The U.S. Department of Commerce has issued a permit to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to import U.S.-made chip-making equipment into China for its Nanjing fab. According to Reuters, Samsung and SK hynix were also given import licenses to bring in specialized equipment that used American-made components into their Chinese factories. These three chipmakers used to enjoy validated end-user status, meaning they could freely import restricted items into China without asking for individual licenses. However, this privilege has expired at the end of 2025, meaning they now have to seek annual approval from Washington, D.C., to continue receiving advanced tools.
"The U.S. Department of Commerce has granted TSMC Nanjing an annual export license that allows U.S. export-controlled items to be supplied to TSMC Nanjing without the need for individual vendor licenses," the company said in a statement to Reuters. It also said that this "ensures uninterrupted fab operations and product deliveries." This move to require annual licenses for the Chinese factories of these chipmakers is a part of the White House's effort to keep advanced chipmaking tools out of China.
Beijing has been working hard to achieve "semiconductor sovereignty," just as the U.S. has been trying hard to prevent it from acquiring the latest chips. Aside from that, ASML, the only manufacturer of cutting-edge chipmaking tools, has been banned from exporting its products to China and servicing those that are already installed. Because of this, we've seen reports that the country is covertly working on reverse engineering EUV lithography tools, and that it has even come up with a "Frankenstein" EUV chipmaking tool, but has yet to produce a single chip.
The U.S. does not allow EUV lithography machines with U.S. technology to be exported to China, even to companies like TSMC and Samsung that have Chinese factories. This means that these fabs are only limited to mature nodes of 16-nm and up. The revocation of the validated end-user status for the China-based fabs of these companies shows that Washington is tightening its grip on chipmaking machines, even older DUV tech, to make it difficult for Beijing to create its own technology.
Despite this, the East Asian nation is pushing hard to develop its own equipment. The central government has even told its chipmakers to use homegrown tools for half of new capacity. And while the country is still years behind cutting-edge tech from ASML and other Western companies, it's slowly taking steps in the right direction.
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