Policy Observatory

Online and electronics retailers will find out on Thursday whether European Union antitrust regulators plan to take any action after a year-long investigation into restrictions on cross-border online sales within the bloc.

The European Commission has fined Google €2.42 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service.

Tech companies earn billions of euros each year from the data they gather from people’s increasingly digital lives.

But to prove these companies have fallen afoul of Europe’s tough competition laws, regulators like Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s top antitrust enforcer, must show that their dominance over vast amounts of people’s data has hampered consumer choice by relegating potential rivals to the sidelines, according to competition lawyers and policymakers.