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While many businesses floundered during the pandemic, Big Tech thrived. Even as markets have entered bear market territory, large technology companies—including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms, and Alphabet—still account for nearly 20% of the S&P 500, a weighted index of the largest public players in the U.S. But stock market indices don’t begin to capture Big Tech’s influence—over culture, speech, business formation, and even democracy. And no one person is doing more to compel technology companies to take responsibility for their power than Margrethe Vestager, a Danish politician who has served as Europe’s commissioner for competition since 2014.
Vestager first made international headlines in 2016 for handing Apple a $14.5 billion tax bill, arguing that the tax breaks it had been granted by Ireland constituted an illegal subsidy. While the decision in that case was overturned, Vestager has not slowed down. In fact, her mixed record in using the courts to stop anticompetitive behavior is what motivated the ambitious double whammy of a legislative agenda that she successfully shepherded through Europe’s legislative chambers this past spring. The Digital Markets Act identifies market-controlling “gatekeepers” and threatens them with serious punishment for self-dealing behavior, while the Digital Services Act takes aim at social media by addressing areas such as ad targeting and misinformation. Big Tech spent roughly $30 million to lobby against the E.U. laws in 2021, and has so far spent more than $36 million on an ad campaign designed to undermine proposed U.S. antitrust legislation that echoes Europe’s.
But Vestager has the momentum. Already, lawmakers in countries including Australia, Japan, Nigeria, and South Korea are following in her footsteps. In the midst of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson in early April, Senator Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate committee overseeing competition policy, made time for an in-person meeting with Vestager in Washington, D.C.
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