Europe has an unri­valled record on anti­trust

Rana Foroohar’s column on “The great US-Europe anti­trust divide” (Opin­ion, Feb­ru­ary 5) appears some­how plagued by flashy lines, buzzwords and a clear dis­dain for facts.

As an enfor­cer I would rather rely on facts and track record, stay­ing as close as pos­sible to real­ity on the ground — all of which is the reason for this let­ter.

For the past 25 years, the European Com­mis­sion has been at the fore­front of enforce­ment in both anti­trust and mer­gers. For most of that period, the EU has been pretty much alone in that battle.

We are happy to have been joined more recently by other jur­is­dic­tions, includ­ing the US. But when it comes to track record, ours is without equi­val­ent. For this reason, we see no need for a rad­ical revolu­tion in EU com­pet­i­tion enforce­ment. Your opin­ion piece simply ignores that real­ity.

Just as it ignores the fact that in digital and tech we are by some dis­tance the anti­trust enfor­cer that has been act­ing for the longest, and doing the most. The Digital Mar­kets Act is the latest example.

In mer­ger con­trol, we have often been the only, or the first ones, to inter­vene. Examples include the pro­hib­i­tion of the Book­ing/Etrav­eli mer­ger. Our inter­ven­tions have often been in co-oper­a­tion with the US and other agen­cies, lead­ing trans­ac­tions such as Nvidia/Arm, Adobe/Figma and Amazon/iRo­bot to be aban­doned or mod­i­fied, like Meta/Kus­tomer.

By con­trast, in the US, the past dec­ades have been marked by soft enforce­ment, in par­tic­u­lar in digital.

The US Depart­ment of Justice and the Fed­eral Trade Com­mis­sion advoc­at­ing for a huge shift, first in mind­set and hope­fully then in action, is evid­ence of that. We, for our part, are engaged in a deep and con­tinu­ous co-oper­a­tion with both the DoJ and the FTC to help make that hap­pen.

It is also very inac­cur­ate and extremely super­fi­cial to state that “con­sumer wel­fare still under­pins the European approach to com­pet­i­tion policy. But Amer­ic­ans are under­tak­ing a much broader exam­in­a­tion.”

EU anti­trust has actu­ally long been cri­ti­cised for not rely­ing on a nar­row con­sumer wel­fare stand­ard, unlike in the US.

Our com­pet­i­tion enforce­ment focuses on the effi­cien­cies of, and harm to, the com­pet­it­ive pro­cess. Any­one read­ing our recent decisions with even some curs­ory atten­tion would have noticed that.

Olivier Guersent
Dir­ector-Gen­eral, Dir­ect­or­ate-Gen­eral for Com­pet­i­tion, European Com­mis­sion, Brus­sels, Bel­gium