On May 13, 2026, the Dutch government formally registered its objection to a US bill that would reach inside the Netherlands and rewrite who controls its most strategically important company. In written answers to parliament, Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma said the Netherlands had communicated its objections — "particularly regarding the extraterritorial aspects" — to both members of Congress and the US administration (South China Morning Post). The bill in question is the Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware (MATCH) Act, H.R. 8170, introduced by Rep. Michael Baumgartner on April 2, 2026 (Baumgartner press release). It would bar ASML from shipping lower-end deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography systems to China and from servicing the machines it has already installed there.
The Dutch objection is not a defense of selling to China. It is a defense of the principle that a Dutch export license should be decided in The Hague.
The strongest case for the bill
Washington's frustration is legitimate, and it should be stated plainly. For three years the US has relied on case-by-case diplomatic alignment with the Netherlands and Japan to throttle the flow of chipmaking tools to China's leading fabs. That approach has been slow, leaky, and reversible at the whim of each election cycle. The MATCH Act's drafters argue that codifying a hard line into statute removes the discretion that Beijing has learned to lobby around. The bill names five Chinese facilities directly — SMIC, CXMT, YMTC, Hua Hong, and Huawei — and subjects their fabs, subsidiaries, and affiliates to a presumption-of-denial regime covering not just sales but spare parts and technical support (Tom's Hardware). If you believe advanced lithography is a genuine military chokepoint, a durable statutory rule is more credible than a presidential memo that the next administration can quietly soften. That is a serious argument, and allies who share the China-risk analysis should take it seriously.
What the bill actually does to Dutch authority
The problem is the mechanism, not the goal. The MATCH Act gives the Commerce Department 150 days to negotiate matching controls with allied supplier nations — principally the Netherlands and Japan. If those negotiations fail, the bill directs an expansion of the Foreign Direct Product Rule to capture foreign-made tools that incorporate US technology (Tom's Hardware). In plain terms: align on Washington's timeline, or have the restriction imposed on your companies anyway through US law. That is the "extraterritorial aspect" Sjoerdsma flagged. It converts a request for cooperation into a deadline backed by a threat.
This matters because the Netherlands already operates a functioning, country-neutral export-licensing system for DUV tools, administered under its own 2023 regulations and assessed case by case. The country has, under US persuasion, already revoked licenses for ASML's most advanced immersion scanners. The dispute is therefore not whether the Netherlands will control sensitive exports — it does — but whether it gets to weigh the economic and security trade-offs itself, as a sovereign, or has the answer dictated to it by a foreign legislature.
Servicing is where the overreach bites hardest
The export ban grabs headlines; the servicing ban is the more consequential provision. Lithography systems are not static appliances. They need constant calibration, spare parts, software updates, and field support, and without it even installed machines gradually degrade. China accounted for 33% of ASML's revenue in 2025, rising to 36% in the fourth quarter, and the high-margin servicing of that installed base has been a key growth driver (The Motley Fool). Ordering a Dutch company to abandon contractual maintenance obligations on equipment it lawfully sold years ago is a retroactive seizure of commercial relationships — exactly the kind of disruption to settled international commerce that proportionate regulation is supposed to avoid.
The Nexperia warning
There is a live precedent for how badly mandate-by-pressure can backfire. As CSIS notes, US pressure over the "50 percent affiliates rule" already triggered the Dutch clawback of Nexperia, which prompted Chinese retaliation and "widespread supply chain disruptions," including Honda factory shutdowns (CSIS). CSIS warns that the MATCH Act "is framed as a mandate rather than a partnership" at a moment when Washington is also threatening European tariffs — and that piling on restrictions tends to accelerate Chinese indigenization while eroding the very "strategic indispensability" that gives US allies leverage in the first place.
That is the pro-innovation case in a sentence: chokepoint leverage is a depreciating asset. Every unilateral squeeze that humiliates an ally and shocks a customer hastens the day China builds its own DUV stack and the leverage evaporates.
A better path
None of this requires the West to go soft on genuine military end-uses. It requires Washington to win the argument inside the existing plurilateral framework rather than legislate over the heads of the partners it needs. A coordinated control is durable because allies own it; an imposed one invites quiet non-enforcement, legal challenge under the EU single market, and lasting resentment. The Netherlands has shown it will act on shared threats. The right response to its objection is to negotiate a common standard — not to treat a sovereign licensing authority as a formality to be overridden by the 150th day.