The Regulators of Big Tech - Margrethe Vestager’s Tech War
Margrethe Vestager, The EU’s new digital czar according to the New York Times, has become one of the most powerful big tech regulators on the planet.
For the past five years, Vestager has been known to initiate billion-dollar fines and investigations against some of the biggest Silicon Valley tech giants such as Google, Apple and Facebook primarily for their violation of antitrust laws and sharing of personal information.
Vestager is the European Union’s competition commissioner, she has recently extended her portfolio to assume more power over the regulations of big tech companies and become what the New York Times call “the European Union’s digital czar.”
As a result of the multitude of legal scandals and public outcries that many big tech companies have been provoking over the last couple of years in regards to the sharing and selling of customer’s private data, analysts believe that her regulatory reach will remain unmatched and supported by everyone who has been affected by privacy disinformation and data management in bad faith. According to Brussels antitrust lawyer Thomas Vinje, Vestager will become “the most powerful regulator of Big Tech on the planet” through her role of digital regulation and antitrust enforcement.
Vestager’s role in antitrust will be centered around assessing if companies are attempting to monopolise the market by unfairly blocking out smaller competition thought their market share. Her aim is to develop new rules on big data behaviour such as the method of collecting user’s data and protecting it from cybercrime.
This role, however, is becoming more and more difficult to assume as digital giants start to branch out into new areas that are increasingly difficult to regulate. This includes areas such as finance with Facebook’s newly proposed Libra Cryptocurrency. Regulators are going to have to face and keep up with the highly sophisticated and ever-changing projects that big tech giants work towards developing.
Another obstacle to the effective regulation of big data stems from the unique circumstances of the digital world. Mainly, the inability for regulators as well as consumers to see the algorithms which determine what users see in search results and how much advertisers pay to reach these users.
Verstager’s current investigations include Amazon and whether they are unfairly using data from third party users on their platform, Apple on whether it is utilising the app store to harm competition and Google for unfairly favouring its own online shopping-comparison service over that of competitors, for which she levied a record $2.7 billion fine in 2017. This year, antitrust authorities fined Google another $1.7 billion for abusing dominance in online advertising, making the overall fine total on Google more than $9 billion.
Apart from the Big Tech firms, Vestager will be in charge of overseeing the technically complex and politically vague incorporation of 5G across the European Union through the Chinese provider Huawei.
One week ago, Apple entered the court to fight one of the world’s biggest tax cases. Regardless of the fact that Apple is the world’s biggest taxpayer, according to Vestager, Apple’s 2016 tax deals with Ireland allowed it to pay far less than other businesses, for which she is ready to levy a record 13 billion-euro ($14.4 billion) tax bill. Ireland, however, commented that it “profoundly” disagreed with these findings.
Despite the lengths that regulators such as Margreth Vestager would go to make an example out of the big tech companies, the EU Competition Commissioner would be better off establishing higher level regulation of all companies in advance, instead of going on a goose chase years later with the attention-seeking intention of breaking tax levy world records.
Ellie Nikolova