Three expert academics will be appointed for one year to work with the European Union’s antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager, who is investigating challenges related to digital technology companies and users.
“Digitisation means markets are going through enormous changes – not just technology markets, but markets throughout the economy,” Vestager, who has taken on Google, Apple and Qualcomm in recent years, said on March 28.
The three academics are Heike Schweitzer, the managing director of the Institute for German and European Economic Law, Competition Law and Regulatory Law, Jacques Cremer, a former scientific director at the Toulouse School of Economics, and Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, a lecturer at Imperial College London’s Data Science Institute and Department of Computing.
As reported by the Reuters news agency, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic worry about the power of a few giant technology companies over businesses and users, with critics even calling for the rewriting of antitrust enforcement rules to make them more interventionist.
Others, however, say enforcers have no business predicting how new technologies should develop and where and how they should be used. US Federal Trade Commission acting chairman Maureen Ohlhausen in a recent speech asked if enforcers were truly qualified to pick winners and losers in the modern economy.
