Europe's top watchdog attacks Google in call for need to regulate big tech
Technology companies should be regulated for safety in the same way electricity or rollercoasters are, according to Europe’s top competition watchdog.
“Digital tech has immense power to do good but with immense power also comes great risks,” said European Competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, during a keynote speech at Web Summit in Lisbon on Wednesday.
“The time is over when the digital world can escape the rules that apply in offline life,” she said. “What happens online doesn’t remain online.”
Vestager cited the example of terrorism, which can be encouraged online but spill over into real-world violence.
The Danish politician has become a symbol of the global pushback against tech companies in the past two years. Since taking charge of the EU’s competition office in 2014 she has hit Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Qualcomm (QCOM), and Google (GOOGL) with fines for abusing their dominant positions.
Vestager singled out Google in her speech, saying that even though it has been a “great innovator … why would we put all our hopes of an innovative future in just one company?”
“No matter how much Google has done—helping us navigate the web or making Android open source—we cannot look away when they threaten competition,” she said.
Vestager’s office fined Google a record $5bn earlier this year for using its Android phone operating system to unfairly cement its dominance in the smartphone market.
She also compared the need to regulate modern technology to the need for safety rules governing electricity in people’s houses or rollercoasters.
“This revolution may be somewhat like riding a rollercoaster,” she said. “The thing about riding a rollercoaster is it can be great fun but you only go on after you are sure it’s going to be safe.”
“The innovation we want is not innovation that is made by getting around the rules. There’s no need to ask people to give up values like democracy, privacy, and fairness in order to get there.”
Vestager said that big tech companies had “harmed” consumers’ trust in them and said recent news has highlighted how technology can be used to “unleash violence, undermine democracy.”
An independent report released by Facebook (FB) this week found that the social media platform was used to incite racial violence in Myanmar, just one example of how tech platforms have been used to ill purposes.
“Tech is changing our democracy, our market, our society, our business opportunities,” Vestager said. “This is a business responsibility. It’s not just a question of ethics, it’s a question of being able to do business.”
Vestager talked extensively about the need for data to be controlled by consumers and fairly distributed, rather than becoming centralised in big tech companies and stifling competition.
“When just a few companies hold lots and lots of data, it can make it very difficult for other companies to compete against them,” she said.
Later in her speech, she said: “Data belongs to us, it is mine, it is my property. We need to be able to control what happens to it.”
She also said European tax laws need to be modernised to reflect “where value is created” and technology needs to “serve us, not serve itself”.
