Last month, the European Commission slapped another fine upon Google for infringing European competition rules (€1.49 billion this time). This brings Google’s contribution to the EU budget to a dizzying total of €8.25 billion (to put this into perspective, the total EU budget for 2019 is €165.8 billion). Given this massive number, and the geographic location of Google’s headquarters, it is perhaps not surprising that some high-profile commentators, including former President Obama and President Trump, have raised concerns about potential protectionism on the Commission’s part.
In a new ICLE Issue Brief, we question whether there is any merit to these claims of protectionism. We show that, since the entry into force of Regulation 1/2003 (the main piece of legislation that implements the competition provisions of the EU treaties), US firms have borne the lion’s share of monetary penalties imposed by the Commission for breaches of competition law.
For instance, US companies have been fined a total of €10.91 billion by the European Commission, compared to €1.17 billion for their European counterparts:
Although this discrepancy seems to point towards protectionism, we believe that the case is not so clear-cut. The large fines paid by US firms are notably driven by a small subset of decisions in the tech sector, where the plaintiffs were also American companies. Tech markets also exhibit various features which tend to inflate the amount of fines.
Despite the plausibility of these potential alternative explanations, there may still be some legitimacy to the allegations of protectionism. The European Commission is, by design, a political body. One may thus question the extent to which Europe’s paucity of tech sector giants is driving the Commission’s ideological preference for tech-sector intervention and the protection of the industry’s small competitors.
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