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European Union’s top antitrust enforcer calls for greater global alignment on tech regulation

‘We do not have a global competition enforcer, but we have global companies,’ Margarethe Vestager tells The Post

The European Commission's executive vice president, Margrethe Vestager. (Stephanie Lecocq/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
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correction

A previous version of this article misspelled the first name of Europe’s top digital regulator. She is Margrethe Vestager. The article has been corrected.

The tech industry’s top European adversary called Monday for greater cooperation among democracies as regulators race to check the power of Silicon Valley titans.

“We do not have a global competition enforcer, but we have global companies,” Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s top digital enforcer, said at a Washington Post Live interview. “The more we are aligned, the better chance we have.”

Vestager has emerged as one of the world’s most influential regulators at a time when countries are increasingly considering regulation targeting the business practices of Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Yet regulators, especially in the United States, have struggled to keep pace with the fast-changing nature of digital markets.

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Vestager said she was “really encouraged” by a recent flurry of antitrust action in the United States, following years of inaction. Before federal U.S. antitrust enforcers opened probes of tech giants such as Amazon and Google, Vestager was bringing challenges against their business practices.

She praised President Biden’s recent executive order that spelled out 72 actions government agencies should take to encourage competition throughout the economy. That directive focused on tech companies’ data collection, surveillance practices and acquisitions in a challenge to the path Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple took to dominance.

“I find that this executive order exactly puts a finger on something really important, that people in their everyday life should have the benefit of competition, of fair competition,” Vestager said.

Biden’s executive order comes as state and federal U.S. antitrust enforcers are increasingly challenging tech giants’ power. Biden recently named prominent Big Tech critic Lina Khan to lead the Federal Trade Commission. Vestager said her recent meeting with the new Democratic chair was “really great.”

“She brings new ideas. She brings something that is within the tradition of the FTC but also that shows there’s a readiness to push enforcement,” Vestager said. “There is an alignment of thinking between us.”

Vestager spoke just days after a bipartisan group of state attorneys general brought an antitrust case against Google’s app store, at least the fourth federal or state competition complaint against the tech giant in the past year. But the burgeoning antitrust movement in the United States suffered a key blow just weeks ago, when a federal judge threw out the antitrust lawsuits against Facebook from state attorneys general and the FTC. The FTC has until July 28 to refile the case.

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Vestager said she didn’t have specific advice for Khan as the FTC revisits the case, but she emphasized the importance of having “fresh eyes” to understand the fast evolving dynamics of tech markets.

She also said that antitrust cases alone won’t be enough to address concerns about the behavior of tech companies, especially because such cases often deal with specific issues and are limited in scope. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee recently advanced legislation targeting dominance in digital markets, and Europe has proposed sweeping new rules for digital giants.

“It’s really important also to have a legislative approach,” Vestager said. “Competition cases are specific and they have their strengths, but I don’t think we can do without sending a very clear message from our democracy that this is how we want really powerful market participants to behave in order for the market to stay contestable.”

Her calls for cooperation among democracies come amid tensions between the United States and Europe over proposed taxes on tech giants. Vestager is scheduled to meet with U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen on Tuesday. She said the E.U. has delayed its plans for a digital levy until October.

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