It’s Google’s World. Regulators are Just Living In It
Dirk Auer, director of competition policy at ICLE, is quoted in this Politico article on the recent U.S. court ruling that favored Google in an antitrust case, the suspension of a related EU case, and the implications for regulators attempting to contain the tech giant’s power. Read the full article here.
For these scenarios, “the Overton window had moved quite a bit,” said Dirk Auer, director of antitrust at the the tech-friendly International Center for Law & Economics, pointing to a series of Big Tech cases, including the EU’s own ad tech case, where break-up has been floated. Following Mehta’s order, a break-up, and in particular an EU-led one, has become a lot less imaginable as a scenario.
But U.S. President Donald Trump’s post on Truth Social — threatening foreign governments that impose digital rules on American firms — may ultimately have proven to be “the elephant in the room,” said Auer. It showed how “the U.S. — rightly or wrongly — will not stand by while other regulators act.”