How the EU is fighting tech giants with Margrethe Vestager

The Verge interviews the most effective antitrust regulator in the world.

Let’s start by laying out the field of antitrust enforcement right now for the EU. Could you go through the big cases that are on the table?

On Friday we just opened a new case with Google and Facebook, now Meta. It’s called Jedi Blue, named after the codename for an agreement that they seem to have entered back in 2018, with the aim, seemingly, to kill off Google competitors in the advertising ecosystem. We also have another Google case exclusively focusing on Google and the ad-tech stack, looking at some of the behaviors that seem to be anti-competitive.

Then we have three Apple cases: one concerning music streaming services and the 30 percent fee, then we have a more general Apple App Store case, and then we have an Apple Pay case about access to the payment infrastructure or technology on your phone. We have two Amazon cases: one concerns access to data — it seems as if Amazon Retail have had access to all the data from the smaller retailers on the Amazon marketplace, enabling Amazon Retail to have a head start on numerous products and prices in the marketplace — and the second is about their fulfillment system. We also have a case concerning advertising in the Facebook environment. So our to-do list is quite full.