Europe’s antitrust cop has Facebook and Google in her crosshairs

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Brussels, Belgium| May 14

Margrethe Vestager is an avid Twitter user who likes to post photos of flowers and cityscapes from her native Denmark.

Her account is also a means of tracking her travels as Europe’s chief antitrust cop and a scourge of big technology companies. Here she is at the European Parliament. Here she is speaking in Washington and at Harvard and delivering a Ted talk in New York. Here she is imposing a $2.9 billion fine on Google for “abusing its search dominance.” And slapping Facebook with a fine for “wrong/misleading information when it took over WhatsApp.” And threatening higher taxes for Apple and other digital companies that do business in Europe.

Vestager was scrutinizing tech companies long before the latest scandals about Russian election interference through social media and misuse of data by Cambridge Analytica. But she said those episodes “changed the context very much.”

“Just as there is a wonderful side to big data in a variety of different kinds and ways, there is a dark side to it as well,” she said in an interview. “And I think that has been much more obvious.”