Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Europe’s tech regulation blueprint
U.S. officials can use EU examples as they look at antitrust issues
LONDON — As U.S. authorities prepare to investigate Silicon Valley’s digital giants, they’ll look for inspiration — and warnings — from Europe, where regulators have led global efforts to rein in the companies with mixed results.
The European Union’s executive commission has slapped Google with multibillion-dollar fines for repeatedly abusing its market dominance to stifle competition. It has also demanded that online companies explain more clearly to users what happens to their personal data, ordered them to pay back billions in taxes and laid out the case for tougher rules covering the digital economy.
National authorities in Britain, Germany, Ireland and France have mounted their own probes over privacy issues and proposed stricter rules on dangerous content.
Despite these efforts, the big technology companies’ power appears undiminished.
“I don’t think it takes a lot of time and effort or detailed study to realize that the commission decisions have not really had any effect,” said Thomas Vinje, lead lawyer for FairSearch, a Brussels-based lobbying group backed by Oracle, TripAdvisor and others. FairSearch was the main complainant in an EU commission case against Google over its Android operating system, one of three antitrust investigations the EU pursued against the company.
The scope of the U.S. regulatory actions is still unclear. The House Judiciary Committee said this past week it’s launching a sweeping antitrust probe of unspecified technology companies. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are also reportedly preparing antitrust investigations.
In Europe, the EU commission has a long tradition of regulating tech companies more tightly, famously taking on Microsoft in the 1990s over its dominance of PC systems.
In more recent years, Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has ramped up those enforcement efforts, slapping Google with a series of fines starting in 2017 totaling nearly $10 billion for antitrust breaches related to its shopping search service, Android mobile operating system and AdSense advertising platform.
In the past year, the commission also opened a preliminary investigation into Amazon over concerns the e-commerce giant is using data to get an advantage over smaller third-party merchants on its platform. It’s also considering a complaint from music streaming service Spotify against Apple over its app store.
“The original enforcement action against Google and search was the Big Bang moment for the ‘tech-lash,’ and this day would not be here if it were not for Commissioner Vestager,” said Luther Lowe, senior vice president of public policy at Yelp, the San Francisco-based online review site, which filed its own EU antitrust complaint against Google.
He indicated that the company thought the investigations were still not far-reaching enough and hoped for further probes into other aspects of Google’s “verticals” business.