Trump is trying to get US tech companies to cut off service for Israel’s critics
After Trump issued an executive order targeting the International Criminal Court, Microsoft removed email service from a prosecutor
The International Criminal Court (ICC) headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands. Photo by Lina Selg/Bloomberg via Getty Images
By Mira Fox June 24, 2025
Most of the world’s major tech giants — companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon — are based in the United States. (Google accounts for over 90% of search queries globally according to tracking site SemRush, and American companies account for over 70% of cloud computing in the world, statistics that I learned by using, yes, Google.)
But no matter how global they may be, these U.S. companies have to navigate American laws and regulations. And now that Donald Trump is president, those rules can come in the form of capricious executive orders to deny service to political opponents.
The International Criminal Court, which is based in the Hague in the Netherlands, issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu last November; the court alleged that Netanyahu, and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, had violated international human rights law by intentionally targeting civilians in Gaza and blocking humanitarian aid.
In a February executive order, Trump disagreed with the ICC, calling the decision “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel” and claiming that “the ICC has no jurisdiction over the United States or Israel.” That order barred U.S. companies from working with the court, and banned non-American members of the court from entering the country; violators could receive fines or jail time. But the only prosecutor specifically named in the order was Karim Khan.
Microsoft, which supplies email service to the ICC, cut off service to Khan in May in response to the executive order.
Microsoft said they had met with the ICC and enacted unspecified policy changes to protect customers from geopolitical tensions; when Trump sanctioned another four prosecutors at the ICC, Microsoft did not cut off their services. (Khan is currently on leave while being investigated for sexual misconduct.)
According to a report in The Verge, Microsoft has also blocked internal emails containing words such as Gaza or Palestine; Israel does not trigger the block. Microsoft confirmed the block on political emails within the company.
The ICC and Israel
The ICC grew out of the International Military Tribunal, the body which conducted the Nuremberg Trials after the Holocaust. Though the court wasn’t officially established until 2002, in 1948 the United Nations declared a need for an international court that could prosecute war crimes and genocides as a response to the atrocities committed by the Nazis in World War II.
But despite the court’s deep ties to the Holocaust, Israel has long had a complicated relationship to the court; in 1998, during one of several meetings to ratify the court’s creation, Israel voted against the court’s establishment because the court considered moving any population into occupied territories to be a war crime.
Israel complained that labeling the moving of citizens into occupied territory as a war crime was specifically included to target Israeli citizens living in the West Bank; an earlier draft of the clause initially specifically named Jewish activity in “occupied Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem” at the behest of Arab nations signing on to the statute.
The ICC, realistically, has little power to enforce its subpoenas and warrants. Instead, it relies on partners such as human rights organizations to act as witnesses and researchers, and other countries to carry out its decisions. The likelihood that Netanyahu would be forcibly arrested and taken to the Hague was already near-zero, even before Trump’s executive order. Still, the threat of American sanctions has caused many ICC partners, including other human rights organizations, to withdraw from the organization.
The ICC has said that the limitations resulting from Trump’s executive order have stalled numerous investigations, including one into allegations that Omar al-Bashir of Sudan is committing genocide. The prosecutor working on that case, an American named Eric Iverson, is suing the Trump administration for preventing him from performing “basic lawyer functions,” according to his attorney.
American dominance of the tech market means that Trump’s ability to slap sanctions on any company working with a political enemy could have far-reaching consequences. Trump could sanction Musk’s Starlink satellite internet company, for example, over the company’s service in Ukraine. If the company bowed to the pressure, it would cut off communication within the Ukrainian army, an act that could end the war in Russia’s favor. And his specific targeting of certain prosecutors at the ICC effectively gives Trump oversight into what is meant to be a neutral court overseeing international wars and peace processes globally.
In the meantime, European companies are racing to build their own resources to reduce reliance on American email providers, firewalls or cloud services. And many are beginning to use Protonmail, an encrypted email service based in Switzerland. They, at least, have a long track record of neutrality.
