There's a popular meme on the internet that goes, we need a total and complete shutdown of X until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

The line comes from a crazy thing Donald Trump said in 2018.

I will spare you.

Anyway, I don't follow Europe's antitrust, or as they call it, competition scene all that

closely.

But when I do check in, I tend to find myself thinking, we need a total and complete shutdown

of European antitrust until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

Margaret Vestager is the European Commission's Commissioner for Competition.

That at least is her official title.

I tend to think of her more as a trade representative whose main work consists of placing tariffs on American technology products.

Vestageras sought to punish Apple, Google, and Qualcomm, and it's likely that before long she'll be doing the same to Amazon and META.

The European Commission calls these penalties, fines, or taxes, but from where I'm sitting, far away in California, it looks like we should just call them rents.

Vestager says she is not driven by animus or bias against America's tech industry. And that may well be so. After all,

America's own antitrust authorities have been closely scrutinizing these companies, too.

Unlike with the DOJ or the FTC, however,

we can't really know whether Europe's competition enforcement is anti-American or neo-mercantilist

because we can't compare how Europe treats foreign big tech firms with how it treats domestic

ones.

Europe does not produce mega successful tech companies.

It only regulates them. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This, of course, is the tech policy

podcast. I am Corbyn Barthold. I'm joined today by someone who, unlike me, actually knows what he's talking about when he talks

about European competition law.

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