EU Internal Markets Chief Claims US Commerce Chief Is Lobbying for Big Tech

Thierry Breton, the EU internal markets commissioner, said a senior U.S. official has been campaigning on Big Tech’s behalf — in spite of the EU’s approval of a draft rule to cut back on American tech companies’ power, Financial Times reports.

This has come along with a trans-atlantic grudge between officials.

Breton said U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has been lobbying on Big Tech’s behalf.

Raimondo, the report says, has said this week that the European rules have disproportionately targeted U.S. tech giants.

Breton said he was slightly “astonished” to learn she’d been airing those concerns publicly, as they’d spoken about it privately, FT writes.

Breton said the CEOs of the big tech companies, including Google and Facebook, had his cell number and were always welcome to call him. He said the companies had also taken part in the executive discussions ahead of the EU draft rules. He said they’d had time to “express their concerns.”

“We could discuss,” he said. “So we don’t need any extra lobbying.”

He added that he wasn’t about to interfere with the U.S.’s debate over how to deal with Big Tech, and that he thought there needed to be a “balanced way of fair play” for fair partners.

The new developments come as the European Parliament has found agreement on the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which contains rules to ban anticompetitive language from the big platforms, including highlighting their own products or services over a competitor’s.

Read more: UK Regulator Advocates Change to Google, Apple’s ‘Vice-Like Grip’ on Mobile App Ecosystems

In addition, big platforms like Google and Facebook will have to share their data with smaller rivals.

In the U.K., regulators have been looking into ways to cut back on the “vice-like grip” Google and Apple have over mobile devices.

In a CMA report from Dec. 14, head of the regulator Andrea Coscelli says the massive bottleneck in mobile usage causes people to lose out, with those aforementioned companies having too much control due to their breadth of operating systems, app stores and web browsers.