Can Huawei Face EU Fines Like Google and Apple?

The European Union’s chief antitrust official, Margrethe Vestager, has made her name tackling big corporate fish in pretty unconventional ways. A ruling on Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which came with a seven-figure fine, argued free services weren’t always good for the consumer, while those on Apple Inc. and Starbucks Corp. deemed that low taxes were illegal state aid (though some judges begged to differ).

True to form, Vestager — in partnership with Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton — is now aiming at a new antitrust target: unfair government subsidies from outside the EU. (They’re illegal inside the bloc, although the rules have been temporarily relaxed because of the pandemic.) Historically the preserve of trade lawyers and diplomats shuttling between foreign capitals and the World Trade Organization in Geneva, these subsidies are now seen as a competition problem that the EU’s executive arm in Brussels must address. And it wants expanded powers to do so.