Today in Brussels,
the European Commission slapped Google with a $2.7 billion fine.
It’s the largest antitrust penalty ever leveled at a single company,
and it’s meant to put the tech giant on notice
for using its near-monopoly on search to promote its own online shopping service in Europe.
In 2013,
U.S. antitrust prosecutors tried to stop Google from employing the exact same practice in America.
But Google exhausted them in court, and the prosecutors eventually gave up.
But they didn’t have Margrethe Vestager,
the EU’s competition commissioner and resident dragon slayer.
Last year,
Vestager found that Apple owed Ireland $14.5 billion in unpaid taxes,
tried to get them to pay up, and landed herself in a huge scrap.
And now, she’s done it again.
Today, Vestager gave VICE News exclusive access as she prepared for her latest battle.
— How do you feel on a day like today?
Level of nerves on a scale of one to ten?
— Three to four.
I’m a little nervous.
Not, you know, sort-of heart jumping out of the chest nervous…
but I can feel it.
— Margrethe Vestager is a giant killer.
And this morning,
she’s after possibly her biggest scalp yet: Google.
— Just give me a sense of the preparation that’s gone into this announcement, then.
— Well in this case it has taken since…
for real, since autumn 2014.
— A former Deputy Prime Minister of Denmark,
Vestager comes from the dead center of old European politics:
economically and socially liberal,
and convinced that politicians should make globalization work for everybody.
— Is all this because you’re Danish?
— No, no, no, I don’t think so.
— Is it because the Danes have a particular view
about how we need to stick by the rules…?
— I think it’s part of it,
because I come from a society where,
when we’re starting out,
inequality is about the same as the U.S.
Then, we tax and redistribute.
So we end up being one of the most equal countries in the world.
And that, of course, is the political culture that I also bring here.
— Not the values of the winner-takes-all internet,
as exposed today.
Google “sneakers,”
and the first thing the world’s biggest search engine will show you
is results from its own comparison-shopping service.
On average, rival price-comparison sites don’t feature until page four.
— What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules.
It has denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits, and to innovate,
and, most importantly,
it has denied European consumers the benefits of competition.
— The risk for Google is that its other services—
maps, restaurants, flight bookings—
will also be subject to an investigation.
The company’s considering an appeal.
But then, Vestayer’s never been shy of a fight.
— It’s a “fuck” finger.
— You met the Google executives in this room?
— Uh, yes.
But that was not only for them, because it’s always here.
— Google has phalanxes of economies, and consultants, and lawyers.
Do you think they didn’t know they were doing wrong,
or do you think they did know, but they carried on anyway?
— Well, we can see that there was this change in strategy.
We can see what they did,
we can see the result of what they did,
which is also why I don’t guess about their motives—
because we find now we have proof of what they did,
and therefore the potential consumer harm.
— Here’s the question I wanted to ask you all day.
Every time you do one of these things—
whether it’s against Apple in Ireland, or against Google,
there’s a huge fuss.
And there’s already a fuss building with letters going
back and forth from Washington about this latest ruling.
And there’s a huge amount of flack directed to you personally over that.
Why do you do it?
— For me, there's no distinction between what I do in my working life and what I believe in.
And, for me, it makes a difference.
Because if you feel that, when I'm in the marketplace,
I'm not being cheated at,
they haven't decided the prices in the back office,
they have not divided the market between them—
if I feel in control in the market,
then maybe I also feel more comfortable in my society as such.
And that, I think, is what is needed.