Europe vs. Silicon Valley: How the continent is responding to big tech’s growing power
Due to this difference, the characterization of Europe’s antitrust and consumer protection laws are often perceived as aggressive, often overly so. But Joe Kane, technology policy analyst at the think tank R Street, doesn’t necessarily agree that its because of deep contrast in law. Rather, “they’re just applying different standards.”
“The FTC has conducted investigations of companies like Google for the same conduct they were fined for in Europe, we just have a stricter standard for showing that there has actually been harm,” Kane told TheDCNF. “The European approach sometimes seems a bit more like ‘get them because they’re big.’”
And perhaps it’s not just the size of the companies, but where they come from.
“It’s not just coincidental that Europe is going after U.S. companies. That is there stated goal,” Roslyn Layton, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and professor at Denmark’s Aalborg University, told TheDCNF. “There is no doubt Europeans are self-interested and want to promote European companies. The sad part is that rather than do it through their own innovation, they want to do it through regulating American firms.”
A key example, according to Layton, is Google, which in her mind shows that the U.S. “takes a consumer welfare standard when we look at antitrust, and the Europeans are looking for what’s good for European companies.”
Consider the fact that in its probe of Google’s practices and arguably anti-competitive behavior, the EU didn’t include Amazon as a competitor to Google Shopping, which yields an “absurd market definition,” according to Kane.
This could conceivably prove that its not so much competition in general that’s lacking on the continent, but instead homegrown European competition that is struggling.
“As always, the goal should be to protect competition, not competitors,” Kane continued. “In a lot of cases, the big companies win not because they’re evil but because they have better products at lower prices, and that is good for consumers.”
