The discussion was about "losing access". To do that the EU would have to impose not just tariffs but complete import bans on dozens or maybe hundreds of OEMs, many of which aren't American. It'd mean starting a phone-oriented trade war with most of the world's big economies, and handing the entire European market to Apple.

But Android is much more popular than Apple phones in some EU countries (not all) mostly because it's a lot cheaper. So either a lot of Europeans would have to fork out a lot more than they wanted to for a phone, or decide they couldn't afford a smartphone at all and go back to feature phones.

This is why you admit the EU would never do this.

When the collective foot is stamped it echoes around the world.

Very Orwellian imagery you have there. It wouldn't really echo around the world. Google wouldn't give a crap. Android was created mostly to stop Apple from gaining a monopoly and holding them over a barrel with respect to services (go read up on the origins of the project). It has wildly succeeded in that mission already. If the EU selectively taxes its own people whenever they buy an Android smartphone, this would not only hurt the EU's own popularity significantly (people love their cheap smartphones), but it wouldn't harm Google much or at all because Apple un-clenched a lot since Jobs died and iOS is a more open platform than it used to be, albeit, still nowhere near as open as Android. The rest of the world is sufficient to keep Apple in check anyway.