Europe has led the global charge against big tech. But does it need a new approach?

In the PastEUDMAEU couple of decades, Europe and America have taken different paths in how they regulate large firms. American watchdogs largely sat back as big business got bigger, most notably the like Google, Apple and Facebook. Europe, in contrast, felt mega-corporations needed to be kept in check. Its regulators became the world’s most fearsome, none more so than Margrethe Vestager, the ’s antitrust chief since 2014. Even as Europe failed to come up with tech giants of its own, it was not in California or Washington that Silicon Valley faced most scrutiny, but in rainy Brussels, home to the European Commission.Liberals anxious to keep markets open and vibrant—including this newspaper—cheered Ms Vestager and the tough approach she embodied. Energetic enforcement of competition rules meant low prices for European consumers shopping for flights, phone calls and more. Americans meanwhile got bilked by firms that had been until little competition remained. Perhaps surprisingly, Europe took on even the mighty tech giants, imposing multi-billion-euro fines on the likes of Google and, at times, forcing changes to tech business models. A sweeping new set of rules, known as the Digital Markets Act (), comes into force this year, giving the more powers over large tech firms. When the Biden administration from 2021 looked to reverse decades of lax antitrust enforcement in America, its watchdogs borrowed many of their ideas from Ms Vestager.