Brussels is 'the capital of the world' for antitrust, said a former boss of the Federal Trade Commission in America
every 20 European internet searches are carried out on Google. Not those done by Margrethe Vestager. The European Union’s competition chief says she mostly looks stuff up on Qwant, which prides itself on not tracking users in the manner its larger rival does.
The measure of market power usually used to justify action on competition grounds is, roughly speaking, that a company is able to raise prices without losing customers. Such an ability suggests that the level of competition in the market needs at least looking into, and perhaps redressing. Facebook, being free to its public users , cannot have its market power analysed in this way.
Europe is not an impressive performer when it comes to creating tech behemoths. It is as well represented among big global tech companies as companies other than Google are in search-engine statistics: there is just one in the top 20. Look at the top 200 internet companies and things are, if anything, a touch worse; just eight. But in regulatory heft theThere are various ways of explaining this.
In recent decades, American antitrust policy has been dominated by free-marketeers of the so-called Chicago School, deeply sceptical of the government’s role in any but the most egregious cases. Dominant firms are frequently left unmolested in the belief they will soon lose their perch anyway: remember MySpace? The lure of fat profits is, after all, what motivates firms to innovate in the first place.
There is not just more interest in regulating big tech in Europe; there is also more power to do so. William Kovacic, a former boss of the Federal Trade Commission in America, said recently that Brussels is “the capital of the world” for antitrust, leaving its American counterparts “in the shade”. American antitrust typically involves prosecuting the case in front of a judge.
When American tech companies first encountered these concerns they were relatively trifling. In 2010 German authorities demanded Google blur the homes of anyone who objected to appearing in its Street View service. Four years later, an-wide “right to be forgotten” provided some circumstances in which citizens could expunge stories about them from search results.
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