By Jennifer Conrad, Wired
Late last week, Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission’s digital competition czar, arrived in New York on a high note. The day before, an EU Court upheld a decision by her office to fine Alphabet for using its Android operating system to hurt competition, setting the penalty at $4.1 billion.
It was a reminder of the power Vestager wields over US tech companies. In 2014, she left her position as Denmark’s deputy prime minister to become competition chief at the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union. In Brussels, she took on Apple for evading paying corporate taxes in Ireland, fined Google millions for favoring its own shopping services in search, and called out Facebook’s lack of transparency in its WhatsApp acquisition—leading to her name being floated as a future president of the European Commission. In 2019, she rose to her current role as the Commission’s executive vice president for competition and technology, taking on broad enforcement power over regulating data collection and monopoly-busting within the European Union.
