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Americas craft brewers already have enough problems. Hard seltzers and cocktails are muscling into beer sales. Millennials and Gen Z dont drink as much as their elders. Brewpubs still havent fully recovered from the shock of COVID-19 five years ago. Now theres a new threat: President Donald Trumps tariffs, including levies of 25% on imported steel and aluminum and on goods from Canada and Mexico. Its going to cost the industry a substantial amount of money, said Matt Cole, brewmaster at Ohio-based Fat Heads Brewery. Trumps trade war will be crippling for our industry if this carries out into months and years. The tariffs, some of which have been suspended until April 2, could impact brewers in ways big and small, said Bart Watson, president and CEO of the Brewers Association, the trade group for craft beer. Aluminum cans are in Trumps crosshairs. And nearly all the steel kegs used by U.S. brewers are made in Germany, so a tariff on finished steel products raises the cost of kegs. Tariffs on Canadian products like barley and malt would also increase costs. And some brewers depend on raspberries and other fruit from Mexico, Watson said. At Port City Brewing in Alexandria, Virginia, founder Bill Butcher worries that hell have to raise the price of a six-pack of his best-selling Optimal Wit and other brews to $18.99 from around $12.99, and to charge more for a pint at his tasting room. Are people still going to come here and pay $12 a pint instead of $8? he said. Our business will slow down. For Port City, the biggest threat comes from the looming tariff on Canadian imports. Every three weeks, the brewery receives a 40,000-pound truckload of pilsner malt from Canada, which goes into a 55,000-pound silo on the brewerys grounds. Butcher said he cant find malt of comparable quality anywhere else. Trumps tariffs also hit Port City in a roundabout way: The levy on aluminum, which went into effect March 12, is causing big brewers to switch from aluminum cans to bottles. Port City, which bottles 70% of its beer, found itself unable to get bottles. Our bottle supplier is cutting us off at the end of the month, Butcher said. That caught us by surprise. Fat Heads Brewery gets its barley from Canada. Cole said it could shift to sources in Idaho and Montana, but the shipping logistics are more complicated. And Trumps tariffs, by putting Canadian barley at a competitive disadvantage, would allow U.S. producers to raise domestic prices. Fat Heads is trying to mitigate the impact of the tariffs. Anticipating higher aluminum prices, for instance, the brewery stockpiled beer canswhich it gets from a U.S. supplierand now has three million cans in its warehouse, 30% of what it needs annually. It has also shifted production to painted cans, which are cheaper than those with shrink-wrapped film sleeves. In Arizona, some brewers are already eliminating or reducing the beers they offer in aluminum cans to cut costs, said Cale Aylsworth, the director of sales and relations at O.H.S.O. Brewery and Distillery and president of the Arizona Craft Brewers Guild. This is a blow to Arizona craft. I hate to see less local options on the shelf, Aylsworth said. Some brewers have also lost access to store shelves from one big customer: Canada, which is the top foreign market for U.S. craft beer, accounting for almost 38% of exports. But Canadians are furious that Trump targeted their products, and Canadian importers have been cancelling orders and pulling U.S. beer off store shelves. The tariffs come at an already difficult time for brewers. After years of steady growththe number of U.S. breweries more than doubled to 9,736 between 2014 and 2024the industry is struggling to compete with seltzers and other beverages and to win over younger customers. In 2024, brewery closings outnumbered openings for the first time since the mid-2000s, Watson of the Brewers Association said. He estimates that U.S. craft beer production dipped 2% to 3% last year. Craft brewing had a period of phenomenal growth, but we are not in that era anymore, he said. Were in a more mature market. Port Citys production peaked in 2019 at 16,000 barrels of beerequivalent to 220,000 cases. Then COVID hit and hammered the companys draft beer business in bars and restaurants. The comeback has been slow. Butcher expects Port City to produce 13,000 barrels this year. The brewery seeks to set itself apart by emphasizing its award-winning brews. In 2015, Port City was named small brewery of the year at the Great American Beer Festival. But it isnt easy with import taxes threatening to raise the cost of ingredients and packaging. Its hard enough to run a small business when your supply chain is in intact, he said. And the erratic way that Trump has rolled out the taxesannouncing them, then suspending them, then threatening new oneshas made it even more difficult to plan. The unpredictability just injects an element of chaos, Butcher said. Aylsworth, in Arizona, said big brewers have whole teams of people to calculate the impact of tariffs, but smaller brewers must stretch their resources to navigate them. That’s on top of the other complexities of running a brewery, from zoning laws to licensing permits to labor shortages. But for many brewers, the heaviest burden right now is lower sales as customers cut back on beer, Aylsworth said. That’s why many brewers are trying hard not to raise prices. In todays world, with the economy and the high level of uncertainty, people are spending less, Cole said. Beer is an affordable luxury, and we want to make sure we dont lose that. Dee-Ann Durbin and Paul Wiseman, AP business writers
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E-Commerce
Apple was hit with a 150 million euro ($162.4 million) fine by French antitrust regulators on Monday for abusing its dominant position in mobile app advertising on its devices via a privacy control tool. The finethe first by any antitrust regulator over Apple’s App Tracking Transparency toolcomes a year after the European Union hit the company with a 1.8 billion euro antitrust fine for thwarting rival music streaming services on its App Store. The head of the French Competition Authority dismissed worries that the decision would prompt retaliation from U.S. President Donald Trump who has threatened to slap fines on EU countries fining U.S. companies. “We apply competition law in an apolitical manner,” Benoit Coeuré told a press conference. “But what we have heard . . . is that they (U.S. authorities) intend to apply antitrust law to the big digital platforms as strictly as their predecessors. So in terms of antitrust, I don’t see any controversy between the United States and Europe on how we apply the law,” he said. The ATT tool lets iPhone and iPad users decide which apps can track their activity. Digital advertising and mobile gaming companies complained it made it more expensive and difficult for brands to advertise on Apple’s platforms. “While we are disappointed with today’s decision, the French Competition Authority has not required any specific changes to ATT,” Apple said in a statement. Coeuré told reporters the regulator had not spelled out how Apple should change its app, but that it was up to the company to make sure it now complied with the ruling. The compliance process could take some time, he added, because Apple was waiting for rulings on regulators in Germany, Italy, Poland, and Romania who are also investigating the ATT tool. The French case, which covered the period 2021 to 2023, was triggered by complaints from several associations for online advertisers, publishers and internet networks accusing Apple of abusing its market power. “While the objective pursued by ATT is not in itself open to criticism, the way it is implemented is neither necessary nor proportionate to Apple’s stated objective of protecting personal data,” the regulator said in a statement. It added that the privacy tool “particularly penalized smaller publishers,” as they depend to a large extent on the collection of third-party data to fund their businesses. Alliance Digitale, the Syndicat des Regies Internet (SRI), the Union des Entreprises de Conseil et d’Achat Média (Udecam), and the Groupement des Éditeurs de Services en Ligne, which had complained to the French watchdog, said the decision was a significant victory for advertisers. ($1 = 0.9239 euros) Florence Loeve and Foo Yun Chee, Reuters
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E-Commerce
U.S. immigration officials are asking the public and federal agencies to comment on a proposal to collect social media handles from people applying for benefits such as green cards or citizenship, to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump.The March 5 notice raised alarms from immigration and free speech advocates because it appears to expand the government’s reach in social media surveillance to people already vetted and in the U.S. legally, such as asylum seekers, green card, and citizenship applicantsand not just those applying to enter the country. That said, social media monitoring by immigration officials has been a practice for over a decade, since at least the second Obama administration and ramping up under Trump’s first term.Below are some questions and answers on what the new proposal means and how it might expand social media surveillance. What is the proposal? The Department of Homeland Security issued a 60-day notice asking for public commentary on its plan to comply with Trump’s executive order titled “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.” The plan calls for “uniform vetting standards” and screening people for grounds of inadmissibility to the U.S., as well as identify verification and “national security screening.” It seeks to collect social media handles and the names of platforms, although not passwords.The policy seeks to require people to share their social media handles when applying for U.S. citizenship, green card, asylum, and other immigration benefits. The proposal is open to feedback from the public until May 5. What is changing? “The basic requirements that are in place right now is that people who are applying for immigrant and nonimmigrant visas have to provide their social media handles,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, managing director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University. “Where I could see this impacting is someone who came into the country before visa-related social media handle collection started, so they wouldn’t have provided it before and now they’re being required to. Or maybe they did before, but their social media use has changed.”“This fairly widely expanded policy to collect them for everyone applying for any kind of immigration benefit, including people who have already been vetted quite extensively,” she added.What this points toalong with other signals the administration is sending such as detaining people and revoking student visas for participating in campus protests that the government deems antisemitic and sympathetic to the militant Palestinian group HamasLevinson-Waldman added, is the increased use of social media to “make these very high-stakes determinations about people.”In a statement, a spokesperson for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service said the agency seeks to “strengthen fraud detection, prevent identity theft, and support the enforcement of rigorous screening and vetting measures to the fullest extent possible.”“These efforts ensure that those seeking immigration benefits to live and work in the United States do not threaten public safety, undermine national security, or promote harmful anti-American ideologies,” the statement continued. USCIS estimates that the proposed policy change will affect about 3.6 million people. How are social media accounts used now? The U.S. government began ramping up the use of social media for immigration vetting in 2014 under then-President Barack Obama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In late 2015, the Department of Homeland Security began both “manual and automatic screening of the social media accounts of a limited number of individuals applying to travel to the United States, through various non-public pilot programs,” the nonpartisan law and policy institute explains on its website.In May 2017, the U.S. Department of State issued an emergency notice to increase the screening of visa applicants. Brennan, along with other civil and human rights groups, opposed the move, arguing that it is “excessively burdensome and vague, is apt to chill speech, is discriminatory against Muslims, and has no security benefit.”Two years later, the State Department began collecting social media handles from “nearly all foreigners” applying for visas to travel to the U.S.about 15 million people a year. How is AI used? Artificial intelligence tools used to comb through potentially millions of social media accounts have evolved over the past decade, although experts caution that such tools have limits and can make mistakes.Leon Rodriguez, who served as the director of USCIS from 2014 to 2017 and now practices as an immigration attorney, said while AI could be used as a first screening tool, he doesn’t think “we’re anywhere close to where AI will be able to exercise the judgment of a trained fraud detection and national security officer” or that of someone in an intelligence agency.“It’s also possible that I will miss stuff,” he added. “Because AI is still very much driven by specific search criteria and it’s possible that the search criteria won’t hit actionable content.” What are the concerns? “Social media is just a stew, so much different informationsome of it is reliable, some of it isn’t. Some of it can be clearly attributed to somebody, some of it can’t. And it can be very hard to interpret,” Levinson-Waldman said. “So I think as a baseline matter, just using social media to make high-stakes decisions is quite concerning.”Then there’s the First Amendment.“It’s by and large established that people in the U.S. have First Amendment rights,” she said. This includes people who are not citizens. “And obviously, there are complicated ways that that plays out. There is also fairly broad authority for the government to do something like revoking somebody’s visa, if you’re not a citizen, then there’s steps that the government can takebut by and large, with very narrow exceptions, that cannot be on the grounds of speech that would be protected (by the First Amendment).” Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writer
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