“American technology giants such as Facebook Inc. will continue to face regulatory pressure in Europe, Germany’s antitrust chief warned,” Karin Matussek reports for Bloomberg. “The Federal Cartel Office is focusing on protecting competition in the digital economy through a strategy ‘”against big internet companies,’ its President Andreas Mundt said at a press conference in Bonn on Monday. The approach consists of two layers: keeping markets open for new players, and making sure consumers can pick products and services in a fair and transparent environment.”
“Mundt’s comments signal there’ll be no let up in the way the internet is policed in the European Union’s biggest economy, after his agency opened a ground-breaking probe into how Facebook scoops up information on how users surf the web to drive its advertising revenue,” Matussek reports. “Mundt has been repeatedly vocal about threats he thinks companies such as Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google pose to democracy and free markets. His agency is cooperating with its French counterpart on algorithms and will take an even closer look at e-commerce issues, he said.”
“Mundt also urged lawmakers to take a closer look at how companies may be able to collect data of users. More regulation is needed here, Mundt said,” Matussek reports. “An important question is whether ‘the collection of enormous amounts of data’ is proportionate ‘to the efficiencies promised’ he said. ‘That’s something we’re also looking at in the Facebook probe.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Seems like Apple is just named here because its big. The real problems as Google and Facebook.
Right now, it appears that Twitter may pose one of the largest threats to democracy.
I suggest that Germany look beyond U.S. companies in terms of threats. What about Alibaba, for instance? China is making a big push to produce a counterpart to every major internet company with a “regulated by China” stamp on them. Those are likely much larger threats in the long run.