By Tom Fairless
LONDON--The European Union should be wary of creating new
regulations targeting large internet companies like Google Inc.
(GOOGL) and Facebook Inc. (FB), the bloc's antitrust chief
Margrethe Vestager said Thursday, arguing that the bloc should seek
to enforce existing antitrust laws to keep big companies in
check.
Senior EU officials have floated a plan to create a new EU-wide
regulator for a swath of mainly U.S.-based Internet companies, amid
concerns that some of these firms are obstructing access to key
online markets, according to an internal document seen by The Wall
Street Journal.
Speaking at an event in London, Ms. Vestager said it would be
"tricky" to design EU regulation targeting the various large
Internet firms like Facebook, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and eBay Inc.
(EBAY) because it was hard to establish what they had in common
besides "facilitating something."
She stressed that her agency already has strong tools to tackle
abuses by large Internet companies. The EU filed formal antitrust
charges against Google in April over its search practices in Europe
and has also opened an investigation into possible barriers that
some companies may have created to cross-border electronic commerce
in Europe.
New EU regulation aimed at reining in large Internet companies
would take years to create and would then address historic rather
than future problems, Ms. Vestager said.
"We need to think about what it is we want to achieve that can't
be achieved by enforcing competition law," Ms. Vestager said.
Much of the behavior by Internet firms, she added, was "very
ordinary," indicating that the EU didn't require new tools to
address it.
"They want to make more money than their competitors, some want
a competitor not to be there," she said.
Write to Tom Fairless at tom.fairless@wsj.com
Subscribe to WSJ: http://online.wsj.com?mod=djnwires