Margrethe Vestager Misleads on Competition

The EU's head of their Competition Commission, Margrethe Vestager recently asked the crowd at Web Summit, "How many of you would like to find your companies on page four of search results?" People should understand that a company's placement on the fourth page is about SEO, not about a failure to pay Google, highlighting Vestager's willful ignorance or highly deceptive actions. But the greater issue here is that she used this misleading allegory to defend her actions against Google:

"We have no objection to Google dominating the market with its search engine. We just don't want it to use that dominance to squeeze out competition."

This is completely untrue, and I have covered this before. Vestager, in fact, has previously identified actions that are used by other search engines and other tech companies, then singled out Google's use of these actions as anti-competitive. Back in 2015, Vestager was interviewed by the late Gwen Ifill about the EU's position against Google:

Gwen Ifill:

"Do other tech companies like Amazon not do that?"

Margrethe Vestager:

"Well, they do not hold a 90 percent dominance in the general search market, as we see it in the European markets, and that’s a very important difference."

Credit Ifill for dragging the truth out of Vestager back in 2015, because Vestager has never repeated these words, since.

EU's understanding of competition is not the same as America's. EU's interpretation of competition originates from Ordoliberalism where the presence of a market-dominant company inherently indicates a failure of competition. In America, generally, anti-competition seeks to find harm and to alleviate the damage caused by that harm. Under a Robert Bork (Borkian?) evolution of the American view, only harm to consumers should be acted upon. In general, Economics recognizes natural monopolies and that they are sometimes beneficial to consumers; such a thing is an oxymoron under an Ordoliberal view.

I don't particularly mind if other people have different views on competition -- I think we should be able to openly discuss the differences and agree to disagree if we cannot come to a shared view. But what Vestager (and by extension the EU) is doing here, is misleading the average person.

Her continued failure to closely regulate EU's market-dominant companies while singling out American ones indicates the true nature of her actions: Protectionism.