All this muscle-flexing also points to a “big pivot” in competition policy, says Cristina Caffarra of Charles River Associates
And the pace may be picking up. On June 4th both Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority and the European Commission, the’s executive arm, launched parallel probes to see if Facebook is using the data it collects to give itself an undue advantage in online advertising. The same day German trustbusters opened another case into whether Google favours its newish “News Showcase”, a curated collection of newspaper articles, in its search results.
In part the regulators are reacting to political winds. “They can do no wrong going after big tech,” quips Justus Haucap of the University of Düsseldorf. America had a similar flurry of tech-related cases last year, when the Department of Justice launched one against Alphabet and the Federal Trade Commission pursued Facebook in concert with state attorneys-general. But other dynamics at work suggest that such cases will become even more common.
For one thing, the competition authorities are increasingly competing among themselves. First in America and now in Europe, all want to leave a mark in tech regulation, observes Thomas Vinje of Clifford Chance, a law firm. The’s German equivalent, wants to establish his agency as a pioneer in tech antitrust.
All this may make trustbusters, particularly in Europe, rely less on a few big investigations and more on a slew of smaller ones—akin to regulation in hoarier industries, in other words. Regulators will move quickly if they think the tech giants have done something untoward. The hope is that the firms may then think twice before extending their digital dominions by bundling an old product with a new one, say, or using data collected elsewhere to favour their own services.
Don’t hold your breath. In the French case, Google agreed to make life easier for rivals, for example by improving access to data. But this is unlikely to diminish its dominance in ad technology. Investors in big-tech stocks have shrugged off the antitrust onslaught. The likely outcome—a constant back and forth between firms and regulators—is tolerable to everyone.case against Google. Three years ago the European Commission fined the firm €4.
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