Taxpayer Watchdog Slams EU’s Billion-Dollar Fine Against Google

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Kara Zupkus (224) 456-0257

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Yesterday, the European Commission (EC) imposed two fines totaling €890 million, equivalent to $1.02 billion, on Google. The EC claims Google has failed to comply with anti-self-preferencing and anti-steering provisions of the Digital Markets Act.

In response to the announcement, David B. McGarry, Research Director of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, offered the following statement:

“The damage European bureaucrats repeatedly inflict on American technology companies is parallelled only by the damage done simultaneously to European users. The European Union’s ‘strategic’ arsenal consists of costly and byzantine regulatory structures, often-arbitrary enforcement, and colossal fines—all at the expense of one of the United States’ most dynamic industries.

“Meanwhile, Europeans have been deprived of genuine consumer choice; instead, they only can choose among the generally subpar options constructed or permitted by regulators. Losing access to world-class services, Europeans must read news articles describing new innovative digital tools whose deployment in Europe regulators have delayed or made impossible altogether.

“Europe’s continuing regulatory aggression is unsustainable. The devices and platforms that define the modern digital world are often taken for granted, but hyperregulation, if it goes too far, will sooner or later create a crisis, a moment of choosing. If America’s technology giants begin to withhold essential digital services from Europe altogether, Europe will have nobody but its own regulators to blame.”

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The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to educating the public through the research, analysis, and dissemination of information on the government’s impact on the economy.