Fighting Google: Europe Eyes Digital Agenda to Better Compete with the US

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/eu-wants-to-challenge-google-with-new-digital-strategy-a-978521.html



Jean-Claude Juncker, the next head of the European Commission, plans to implement a new digital strategy for the Continent. Europe, he believes, needs to become better equipped to defend itself from the US and Asia.

Fighting Google: Europe Eyes Digital Agenda to Better Compete with the US
By Frank Dohmen and Christoph Pauly
July 01, 2014 – 05:51 PM



To the competition regulators in Brussels, Google has something akin to frequent flier status. Hardly a week goes by that an injured company doesn't deliver incriminating information about the Internet giant to the European Union capital.

The flood of complaints is coming from a growing number of markets where the company wasn't previously active. On June 11, Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia wrote a letter to his colleagues on the European Commission, the EU's executive, outlining some of these markets. The letter states that they include "social networks, video catalogue, streaming, mobile phone operating systems and apps." Among the latest complainants, the letter notes, is an advertising platform, the alliance of European photo agencies known as CEPIC, the Open Internet Project, which unites European publishers, and Deutsche Telekom. It can be safely predicted that Google's compliance with EU competition law will be closely monitored for a long time to come.

The competition commissioner claims the allegations are always in the same vein -- that Google is using its dominant position to force competitors out of an increasing number of markets. It's likely that Almunia will also have to tighten the conditions it is imposing on Google as part of current market abuse proceedings being conducted against the company. Almunia had wanted to end the proceedings by requiring the company to make relatively harmless concessions. Now, however, he writes to his fellow commissioners: "Once the comments from complainants are received during the summer, we will need to evaluate whether their arguments and evidence may justify a potential rethink of some aspects of the remedy."

It's not only the Spanish commissioner who appears to be waking up to the seemingly unstoppable advance of massive American Internet firms. In an essay recently published in the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, German Economics Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who is head of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), wrote that people needed to stand up against the "brutal information capitalism." He argued "only the European Union has the power required to change the political course and rewrite the rules."