Financial Times - Europe must not tie its hands in the fight against corporate power
Last week, as she prepared to step down after a decade as the EU’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager saw her efforts to force Apple to pay back taxes and to crack down on Google’s abuse of its market power vindicated by the European Court of Justice. While Vestager could and should have gone further, she deserves credit for putting competition enforcement back on the map.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has appointed Teresa Ribera, currently Spain’s deputy prime minister, as Vestager’s replacement. One immediate challenge Ribera faces is that her portfolio is far broader than her predecessor’s — not only must she handle competition, she also has to ensure the EU meets its climate targets and lowers energy prices while driving forward a new “clean industrial deal”.
There is a risk that competition enforcement falls through the cracks as a result. But allowing that to happen would be a serious error. Intelligently done, this is the most powerful tool the commission wields to shape markets in the public interest.
Read the full piece here.
However she handles the role, Ribera will face immediate pressure to take a different approach to Vestager. Both Enrico Letta’s report on the single market and Mario Draghi’s on competitiveness have called for competition enforcement to enable corporate scale.
Their recommendations are mirrored in the “mission letter” issued by von der Leyen to Ribera, which advocates a “new approach to competition policy . . . more supportive of companies scaling up in global markets”. This is problematic.
While Europe’s internal market is too fragmented, monopolistic European champions aren’t the solution. Neither is giving dominant European firms a blank cheque to merge a recipe for global competitiveness…
Market concentration is a political problem as well as an economic one — EU competition policy should reflect that