Europe shows challenges for US regulators targeting Big Tech

As U.S. authorities prepare to investigate Silicon

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Valley's digital giants, they'll look for inspiration—and warnings—from Europe, where regulators have led global efforts to rein in Big Tech with only 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, meanwhile, 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, underscoring the challenge for U.S regulators.

"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 U.S. tech company. Vinje blamed the slow pace of the investigations and lack of effective enforcement "remedies" to restore competition.

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-europe-big-tech.html