With American industries broadly stressing out about President Donald Trump’s looming tariff plans, there’s one that sees a possible upside: Big Tech.

For years, Silicon Valley giants have been complaining about foreign regulations on their platforms — taxes, fines and restrictions that the U.S. doesn’t impose, but other large governments do.

Now, tech lobbyists are cautiously hoping President Donald Trump will use his tariff policy as a blunt-force instrument to push it back.

“We need to hold our trading partners accountable if they’re not giving our exporters a fair shake in markets abroad,” said Matthew Schruers, president and CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association. “Tariffs are one tool in the toolbox.” He said tech lobbyists are “encouraged there’s a conversation underway here.”

But they’re also facing the uncertainty of any business counting on Trump’s trade policy: It all depends if he actually sees this as a negotiating tactic, or if he just really likes tariffs.

With the EU, Canada and other allies passing serious tech regulations over the past several years — including privacy rules, antitrust fines and digital taxes — Schruers and other lobbyists have been railing against these policies as unfair to American firms, which are the world’s largest tech players.

Trump has shown signals he sees the world this way as well, telling a Davos audience in January that EU fines against Apple, Google and Meta are “a form of taxation” and that their laws are unfairly rigged against American companies.

That has raised hopes that Trump’s tariff play will be part of an elaborate strategy to get Europe and others to the negotiating table.

So far, however, the tech lobby has received few indications that he’ll handle it that way. In fact, they’re struggling to get any information from the White House.

“We’re trying to keep our head on straight,” said Ed Brzytwa, vice president of international trade at the Consumer Technology Association, whose members include Apple, Google and Meta. “It’s been very difficult to understand where the administration is going with its trade policy in general.”

Brzytwa is worried by new rumblings that the president will abandon plans for reciprocal tariffs in favor of a blanket 20 percent levy on all imports. Trump’s incessant claim that tariffs are the perfect revenue generator increasingly suggests he won’t soon roll them back — leaving little leverage for negotiations on digital policy.

“Everything seems to indicate that the tariffs will be sweeping, they will be high, and they will collect a tremendous amount of revenue — at first,” Brzytwa said. He warned that revenue would fall precipitously the longer tariffs remain in effect — and the impact on the tech sector would be disastrous.

“What we’re worried about is the tariffs causing sales to disappear,” said Brzytwa. “That U.S. consumers will stop spending, that things will become too expensive, that they’re just going to keep their money in their pockets, as opposed to purchasing the newest — and, frankly, the most productive and innovative devices — that our member companies have to offer.”

Schruers admitted that Trump’s penchant for tariffs “carries some risk” for the tech sector.

“But you know, there’s no opportunity without risk,” he added. “And I think there’s certainly an opportunity for a major, valuable deal that works in the favor of the global economy here.”

The Trump administration has already released multiple memos stating an intent to confront digital taxes, foreign regulations and other so-called barriers to digital trade. Schruers and Brzytwa spoke highly of a report released on Monday by the U.S. Trade Representative, which raised concerns about a number of foreign tech rules.

There’s already some indication that the tariff threat is working in Big Tech’s interests — even if Trump isn’t explicitly framing it that way.

Officials in the U.K. are offering to pare back a planned digital service tax if it means avoiding Trump-imposed tariffs. And India scrapped its own 6 percent digital tax late last week — a move that Megan Funkhouser, senior director of policy, tax and trade at the Information Technology Industry Council, attributed to fear that the 2016 tax would attract U.S. tariffs.

However, there’s a pessimistic case for the industry as well: Instead of caving on tech enforcement, there are signs the European Union is prepared to double down in the face of U.S. tariffs. Despite some talk of soft-pedaling its planned fines against Apple and Meta, Brussels appears to be prepping for a full-on trade war that specifically targets the U.S.’s tech industry.

“Push too far, and Brussels could tighten the screws,” Tobias Gehrke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told POLITICO’s Camille Gijs. Gehrke singled out new “digital levies on Silicon Valley” as one way for the EU to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs.

Lobbyists also worry that the Trump administration isn’t rowing in the same direction internally on tariffs. Even while praising some aspects of the new administration’s work on digital trade, Brzytwa said Trump and his White House have taken a more haphazard approach.

The disconnect has lobbyists guessing about the real intent behind Trump’s tariff push. Is it really about negotiating better trade deals with other nations, or does the president actually believe tariffs are smart policy?

The nightmare scenario for tech is if Trump imposes massive tariffs in an attempt to bring in revenue, with no immediate plans to roll them back in response to concessions.

Brzytwa said the pain of blanket tariffs on most goods would be compounded by an extra layer of sectoral tariffs, specifically those planned for semiconductors. “Everything that we work with in the technology space has a semiconductor,” he said.

Tech lobbyists have tried to get these warnings to the White House, with little success so far. But despite mounting evidence to the contrary, they’re still hoping any tariffs will be limited in scope and designed to roll back policies they’ve long disliked.

“If you want to use these tariffs as a negotiating tactic to lower barriers to trade and to eliminate tariffs, that’s good for the United States, that’s in our interest,” said Brzytwa. But imposing blanket tariffs without an endgame “undermines the entire notion of a rules-based multilateral trading system.”

“That is something that our industry, and I think every single industry, values,” Brzytwa said. “We value rules, we don’t value a Law of the Jungle-type system.”