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In September 2016, Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook described Margrethe Vestager’s efforts to make his company pay more tax as “political crap”. Three years later, Donald Trump called the EU competition commissioner the “tax lady” who “hates the US”.
During her seven-year stint as Europe’s most powerful regulator, Margrethe Vestager, the former Danish deputy prime minister, has imposed multi-billion pound fines and tax orders on some of the world’s most powerful companies, including Google and Apple. But she has also learned that “competition law enforcement is not enough”. More than five years after it began, the legal battle over Apple’s tax payments hasn’t concluded. And last year, a study called into question the effectiveness of the Commission’s efforts to make Google resolve competition concerns: still less than 1 per cent of the traffic to its shopping search engine was being directed to rival sites.
In this wide-ranging video interview, the EU digital chief concedes that “competition law enforcement, as we have done it, is not in itself sufficient”.
Watch more video from the New Statesman at www.newstatesman.com/video
