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Spotlight on ...

TOWARDS THE

EU DIGITAL SERVICE

ACT

Text: Alan Rhode, Co-Founder Taxmen

Twenty years ago, European Union leaders acknowledged that the bloc had a difficult

delivery in the 1990s with the birth of the internet. However, they insisted with grand
fanfare, at a special economic summit in Lisbon in the spring of 2000, that by 2010, the EU
would become the world’s “leading knowledge-based economy”.

espite an ambitious legislative action plan, when So, after nearly 30 years of dominance by the “digital
2010 arrived, and Internet 2.0 kicked in, the EU giants” - as the French Finance Minister likes to call them
Dwas still chasing Silicon Valley. While it might - Margrethe Vestager and the new European Commission
have tamed Microsoft and its attempt to monopolise have thrown down the gauntlet. They have made it clear
computer operating systems and browsers, Facebook that over the next four years, the EU competition regulator
and Twitter were taking off. So was Google. Meanwhile, will turn the tables for Internet 3.0. Moreover, in language
the Apple smartphone destroyed Nokia’s handset the U.S. Tech giants will recognise, the EU executive body is
dominance. And Amazon continued ahead of its European “loading up for bear” in order to cut the FANGS to size.
competitors.
While Vestager is leading the charge, she has a sidekick
From 2015, the European Competition Commissioner, in Thierry Breton, a titan from the French industry and
Margrethe Vestager, put Big Tech on notice, saying that the now the European Enterprise Commissioner. Fellow
“good cop” approach of her predecessor Joaquin Almunia commissioner Vera Jourova, a Czech holdover from the last
was over. And despite taking decisive legal action, including Commission with justice and consumer policy in her brief,
the €13 billion tax decision against Apple (which the is also part of the take-down team.
EU lower court recently rejected), and hefty fines against
Google, relatively little has changed since the year 2000.

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