Take a look at this article about Margrethe Vestager. In case you don’t know who she is, she has the job of representing the EU when holding tech monopolies accountable1.
Specifically, this part stood out to me:
Our work here is still a work in progress. In these individual cases, the fine is a punishment for past illegal behavior. The second element in such a decision is a cease-and-desist order. And then we have the third element, which is a more restorative approach. Because what we have seen in Google’s case is that even when the illegal behavior stops, that doesn’t necessarily open the markets. Once you own a particular market, it takes a lot of effort to open that market for competitors. And this is why we also need a regulatory approach.
The way trust-busting works is not just to interrogate whether a given company has a monopoly on a market and come up with punitive measures. It’s to set up a sustainable path forward so the market is able to support multiple competing players. This is not an easy task, and I’m interested to see what happens next.
If you’d like a more comprehensive view of what’s going on with the European Union and their relationship to the tech industry, take a look at this TechCrunch article.
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Read more about Vestager on her Wikipedia page. ↩