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IPFS News Link • European Union

Google and the EU foreign policy

• http://econlog.econlib.org, Alberto Mingardi

Wayne Crews has an excellent piece on Forbes. Wayne digs into the politicalnature of antitrust. He points out that "antitrust's goal is getting forced access to the customer base of the the successful firm and allowing competitors to sit still.
The second but equal goal of antitrust is to enrich the antitrust bar and bureaucracies, expanding the state for new incursions and aspirations for power, such as net neutrality."

There is much of politics in European competition policy. It is not by chance that some of its past major targets have been American corporations: GE, Microsoft, Intel, to whom we may now add Google. Somebody in Brussels may be convinced that competition policy is the only real foreign policy the EU really has.

It is easy to compare the situation of Google today with that of Microsoft some ten years ago, when it got fined by then European Commissioner Mario Monti. (Crews has a nice point: it is nonsense to talk about a "Competition Commissioner").


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