Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Breaking Up Big Tech Is Too Scary for Europe

EU regulators have a better case against Amazon, Facebook and Google than the U.S. does, but there’s a reason they haven’t acted.

March 13, 2019 at 5:30 AM UTC

By Leonid Bershidsky

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

All talk, no action.
Photographer: John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images

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U.S. politicians, who, like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, want to break up the big technology companies are treading onto a path that has long drawn their European colleagues. Europe has better opportunities and more compelling reasons to dismember Amazon, Facebook and Google. Yet it hasn’t done so, despite years of discussion.

There are at least three reasons the EU is better positioned to break up the internet giants. One is that they’re even more dominant in Europe than in the U.S. Only Amazon, according to some incomplete data, isn’t dominant in Europe; Google and Facebook are beyond any competition in their narrowly defined markets of search and social networking.