In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Commissioner Margrethe Vestager: EU’s Top Regulator on Big Tech, Competition, and the Future of AI

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

This week, Nicolai is joined by Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s leading enforcer of competition laws and the driving force behind high-profile cases against tech giants like Apple, Google and Meta. As European Commissioner for Competition, Vestager shares how her work shapes the digital economy, from ensuring fair competition to regulating the use of AI and digital services. She dives into the challenges of regulating Big Tech without stifling innovation and Europe’s need for strategic independence from global powers like China. Gain insights from Europe’s antitrust leader as she navigates regulation, global competition, and the rapidly evolving tech landscape.In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management.New episode out every Wednesday.The production team for this episode includes PLAN-Bs Pål Huuse and Niklas Figenschau Johansen. Background research was conducted by Kristian Haga and Riga Tenzin.Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, everybody. Today we have a very special guest, Margrethe Vestager, who leads the European Commission for Competition. Now, Margrethe has spearheaded many antitrust cases against the most powerful companies in the world, including Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta. And I'm sure, Margrethe, that all CEOs in the world get proper nerves when your name shows up in their inbox. Big welcome to this podcast. Well, thank you very much. And of course, I hope that they completely keep their calm because they like competition and they know that they're on the right side of competition law. There we go.

Now you have a very long title. What is your mandate? Well, basically, as you say, I enforce European competition law, but also I have sort of a coordinating responsibility for Europe making the best use of digital technology. So making sure that technology serves people and the tool to make that happen is of course that you can trust technology. What is the aim of regulation? Well I think that if you look at how Europe approaches new technology, we tend to be more risk averse than in other parts of our planet. And for instance, our AI regulation, the point of that

is to make sure that we can trust when AI is being used in situation where it may be critical. If a municipality is using AI to decide who can get a social benefit, then you really need to make sure that there is a human in the loop and that you can trust the AI to get it right. And this is not theory because we've had the first scandal. If you look at the piece of legislation like the Dental Services Act, it obliges service providers to make sure that their services are safe. That for instance, Instagram cannot provoke mental illnesses,

that TikTok or Twitter cannot be used to undermine our democracy. And the Digital Markets Act is there to make sure that the market is open and contestable, so that it is worthwhile to invest also in startup and scale up, because you know that it depends on their idea, their work ethic, their capital, their products. It doesn't depend on some gatekeeper opening the gate to the market or not. So with these three examples, I try to show that regulation is a way to keep the market healthy and to make sure that technology actually is here to serve us.

And in doing so, also making sure that there is plenty of room for innovation. So we'll come back to the digital side of things, which is of course very, very important and topical, but just generally, how do you balance competition within Europe versus Europe being competitive globally? It's very important that you sort of exercise your competitive muscle in your home markets, which is why the single market of the European Union should work well and in some instances better than today in order to be

able actually to win the competition outside of the European Union on the global market. We just revisited a merger that we prohibited five, six years ago, which was the merger between two companies Siemens and Elstam. And it was prohibited on grounds of signaling systems and very high speed trains. Because the companies couldn't find ways to solve the competition problems, they would have very, very high market shares in Europe. And there was a lot of talk about this, that the Chinese would overtake the global market.

We have revisited the market now, and it turns out that the Chinese are very big in China, but not in many in any other markets of significance. Two companies in particular have filled order books and are playing really well and those two companies actually are Siemens and Nalom in the global marketplace. Have you prohibited mergers which you should not have prohibited? I don't think so because it's something that we do really rarely and we do it with a lot of restraint. We go to the outmost efforts to make sure that businesses can solve the competition

concerns that we may have. Because it's not for us to decide whether businesses should merge or not. It's for us to make sure that if they merge, follow-on competition problems should be solved. So only in a situation where the businesses either don't want to or cannot solve competition problems would we take a step to a prohibition? And which of the ones which you have let through should you have stopped? Well, that is difficult to say. We try to revisit what we, if the solutions to competition problems, if they actually work. And that's a very difficult discipline because it may be that we say we need to have a fix

it first. We need to know to whom you want to divest this business where you have an overlap in a market, where you would have a maybe a de facto monopoly. Then we look at the buyers of this divested business and it may all look fine also financially, but then maybe two years down the road, three, four years down the road, problems arise, markets changes, and then it turns out that the buyer cannot make it. That, of course, is really painful because customers will suffer from this. Workers will suffer from this.

But it's also very, very difficult to predict whether a buyer years down the road will still have the financial capacity. We prefer a buyer which is in the market so that you have the necessary knowledge about the market. For instance, if it's chemicals, we prefer someone who is also in chemicals to buy a divested business rather than a venture fund or something like that, in order for someone actually to go into that market, use the assets, be a competitive force in that market.

Do you think where we are now that there is a bigger risk for under regulation or over regulation? I think the risk is that regulation sometimes is made quite fast and that is not implemented in full. So it's better to have a thorough thought for legislative process and implement in full than rushing to something because you think you have a need here and now. Even if you think that you have a need here and now, the key for good legislation is that it's fully implemented and that you have resources to fully implement it. When I talk about thoughtful regulation, it is regulation where you have time to take views on

board. Views of industry, views of NGOs, views of those who take an interest, other regulators. Because then you will have a much higher probability of making a piece of legislation where you're solving a legitimate proven problem in the lightest possible manner. Because we have, I think, quite a heavy regular bureaucratic burden on some sectors where businesses find that, well, of course, fine, sure, we'll do this, but couldn't that have been done in a lighter manner? But do you coordinate your work with the industrial policy? Do you ever sit down and think, you know what, we need a bigger champion in this industry or that industry in order to compete with America, China, and so on?

I think the best example of a pro-competitive merger is the creation of Airbus. It goes back many years by now. Had that not happened, there would only have been one producer wide body aeroplanes. And I think that's a very good example where you have a market situation that is really unbalanced and where you can do something by combining businesses then then become able to scale. I would hope that the next Commission would have a thorough look at the defense industry since defense budgets are increasing and and we spent most of that today outside of Europe.

There is indeed room for consolidation of a European defense industry in order to be more competitive towards competitors outside of Europe. I think that's an obvious example. A third approach to that would be to look at the single market to make it work in full. We still have markets where their national characteristics are much more obvious than any European dimension. We really miss a European capital market. We really miss a European telco market.

And that of course makes consolidation more tricky, because then it's more difficult to harvest efficiencies in what would be cross-border mergers, where a true European single market would be a much better sort of fertile ground to exercise your competitive muscle and be better to scale also outside of Europe. You say we lack a European telco market, but isn't that because of you? No. In America, we have three operators. In Europe, we have three in each country, right? So we have a total of 30. They're all tiny and not doing that well.

No, it's not because of me. It's because of the market structure. I think the four biggest operators in Europe, they organize about 60% of all customers. So it's not that we have a situation that is that much different from the US. The difference is that for the businesses who are in more than one country, they are still having to look at national characteristics. We do not even have a European prefix. There are differences in regulation.

There are differences in how things are done by national regulator. So what we need is a true European market for telco, and then I think we would have bigger telco businesses, because then they would grow also organically within that market. Moving a bit here and spending some time on technology, which of course is extremely topical. Now Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodeo of Entropic say that they don't fully understand how the advanced AI models work. How can you guys understand it? But we don't try, because I think it's overly ambitious to try to regulate technology.

What we occupy ourselves with is to look at the use of technology. Because it's in the use cases that you see that humans may be squeezed, discriminated, not seen as who they are. So if the algorithm, the AI algorithm is generation 1, 2, 3, 4, well that may be for the developers to figure out how to work with transparency and explainability. For instance, a health system in a member state to use artificial intelligence as a supportive technology to doctors making decisions about diagnosis and treatment, it's really important for them to know that when they use that, the algorithm will actually recognize symptoms both in a man and in a woman. So we are looking at that use case and sort of making sure that those who are responsible

for the use case know what they're doing and for that then to filter back to developers so they, okay, I would want to have my share of the European health market, so I should make sure that my AI algorithm would have the features that you can safely put that into use without risking, in this example, half of the population because you do not recognize the symptoms in a woman of a heart attack, for instance. What are the complexities in the European Digital Markets Act, which you haven't seen before? It just seems like it's taken complexity to a new level here.

I think that one of the things that are difficult also for the businesses in scope is the very politicized debate around the Dint of Services Act. So the Dint of Services Act do not regulate content. There's no European legislation saying you can say this but not that. It all relates with national legislation on content. In most countries hate speech is forbidden, it's forbidden to excite to violence, it's forbidden to recruit to terrorism, it's forbidden to, of course, abuse children, but also to exchange photographs of children that are being abused.

What the Dintro Services Act is doing at the European level is to say you need to have a system so that you can filter out things that are illegal in the member states where you do your business. And in that system you also need to tell people your content has been filtered out so that they can complain about it. That's the first obligation. The second obligation is to do a horizontal risk assessment

to say, could my services be damaging, for instance, to mental health because they have an addictive design? We just had a case with TikTok who wanted to launch a new product that would give you points when you interacted with content. So if you liked the video, if you saw it all to the end, if you shared it, if you commented, you would get points and you could use those points for e-commerce.

So you could basically get a voucher. And we could not get any kind of certainty that they had assessed whether this design who might be extremely addictive, whether that was the case and if they had mitigated those risks. And it ended up that they would not launch this product in Europe because they could not certify that they had actually done their homework to make sure that this was a safe product to use. How is it to work with these big tech companies? It depends on the company.

I mean, how forthcoming are they? And how willing are they to engage in a conversation with you when you call? They're very different. They have very different cultures. The first time I was ever in Silicon Valley in Palo Alto was quite recently. I went because I had a speaking obligation. And then I visited Apple and Google. And Apple, they live in this gated building of steel and sort of pale light marble. A perfect, it's not a circle, it's an oval, I think.

Google, they live, of course, they have security, but ungated, in a very colorful, sort of low barrier environment that seems to have grown as the business has grown. And you know, just by how they present themselves in their architecture, I think tells a lot about the company culture. You know, the fact that... So who is the most difficult to work with? Well, they have their own difficulties and of course their own charms as well. As you can hear, the building of the Apple Headquarters also reflects that you are a walled garden from

the gadget, the phone itself, to the operating system, to the different apps, where the Google environment is much more open. You know, it's not a Google phone, it may be a Samsung phone with an Android operating system. So you see those differences in also how they approach regulators. Should the big tech companies be broken up? Well, I think that would be a measure of last resort. Anything you can do before you get to that to solve a problem should be done. Right now we have a Google case concerning advertising. The

very short non-technical version is that Google owns the marketplace where those who buy ads and those who sell ads at Placing, they meet. But they also own the ones who buy at Placing and the ones who sell at Placing. So if you own the buyer, the seller, and the marketplace, well, then you have a conflict of interest. And here, you know, when we set the statement of objection, we said we have huge difficulties in seeing how that conflict of interest can be solved without part of this being governed by a third party. So a breakup of this specific part of the Google ecosystem.

Of course, we're all ears ifS. If it can be done differently because it's set, we have the competence to ask for a breakup of a company, but it would be a measure of last resort. Do you coordinate your work with the U.S. chair or the Federal Trade Commission? On specific cases when we have the waivers from companies so that we can talk, we do, yes. And we also have sort of a more high-level discussion about how things are developing.

It's like a sibling to what was created in this mandate, the Trade and Technology Council. I headed with my colleague Wadid Dombrovsko on our side. On the US side is Blinken, Raimondo and Thay, who heads it. This Trade and Technology Council has a sibling, which is a sort of a structured dialogue between the FTC, the DOJ and us. It takes place once a year and we discuss development in technology, in markets, in how we use our tools. And a specific example would be the very recent sort of common communication between the FTC, the DOJ, us, and actually also the CMA of the UK,

about how we will work together and approach the question of how AI will affect the marketplace. Because we saw how market dynamics, they accelerated with sort of the first big chapter of digitization. And our theory or idea is that that acceleration in market developments may actually increase with AI when it gets more and more embedded in businesses and in the business models. So when the companies say that, hey, there is too much regulation in Europe and it's too complicated, we are not going to launch your products, you will have less availability

and so on, is that a credible threat? I think it's a really important discussion because it points to the fact that we need to do more to increase European competitiveness as such. And here, you know, competition is a necessary ingredient, but it's not enough. And it's a tricky thing because we have shown to solve crises that are questions of life and death in our face, really fast-paced crises, pandemic, war, energy crisis, inflation. Europe has come together. Now the crisis of competitiveness is a slow one. Competitiveness being eroded over years, it will take time to rebuild because it's a question of market access, safe supply chains, easy permitting, authorities who are fast in what they do, access to research and innovation organizations, and of course, better access to capital.

But Margrethe, do you improve competitiveness by regulating more? No, I don't think so, but sometimes, for instance, if you look at biotech, Europe prides itself in having some very important biotech environments. In Denmark, in Belgium, in France, cutting edge front end, it's a factor of competitiveness, the time from innovation to market. And in order to speed that up, I think it's necessary to do a biotech act in this coming mandate. Because sometimes biotech sort of falls into sort of an old school thinking about how to regulate a chemical, a novel chemical that needs to get to market.

And biotech is specific. It has its specific characteristics. It works very differently from a more old school chemical. So here, the regulation comes into place actually to make it faster and easier to get to market, not to make more barriers. But the regulation is needed because otherwise you would be caught up in other pieces of legislation that would then make things more difficult.

But so some American investors such as Mark Andreessen and so on have said that, listen, we need to build, we need to stuff AI into everything we do in order to beat the Chinese, right? We need to stuff it into weapons, cars, you know, pharma research, all these kinds of things. So by regulating AI a lot, are we holding back the European competitiveness versus America and China? Well, the regulation that we have do not regulate research in AI or based on AI at all. It's hands off, full stop. There's no regulation. It doesn't say that you cannot do this, you cannot do that.

What it says is that if you're in a situation where there is a risk of people being discriminated, then you have to take certain measures. So basically you can do so, so, so many things. It is when it comes to the use cases, so the market creation, that the AI regulation really touches you. And looking at Europe, if you say, okay, I want to prove my algorithm in my home market before I really can go in for in the global market, then, for instance, the European welfare states is an obvious place for a market creation for trustworthy AI.

That you can use AI in health systems, in social systems, in educational systems, because you can trust it. You can also say, well, listen, look at us. We can do this. People trust what we do with AI. That will be a market creating approach to the use of AI that I think will be reflected in also a very strong selling

point outside of Europe. Because who wants to use an AI where there is a risk of your citizens being discriminated? Well, for sure, some big questions in the tech sector here. Let's move on to something slightly easier. Banking sector. Now, what are the trade-offs between having a competitive internal market with many banks in one country or building up a bit more kind of global champions? Well, I think it's very important to have both. Well, I think it's very important to have both. There are different customer preferences. It would be much better for Europe if we had one European capital market. It would also make it much easier for banks to consolidate, where we now think about that cross border, because then it would be easier to harvest efficiencies

and making sure that it would be actually beneficial for you to be in more countries. So I think the push still for the capital market to work, and it's very much a push towards member states to take down in full that European legislation, European enforcement should take the place of national legislation and national enforcement because then you get a full working single market also for for banking because for for business, for some of the huge conglomerates, in order for them to be

relevant to work with a European bank, of course you need size. You need to be able to scale, you need to be able to get global services. So I really hope that we can do this push. There is a test inspired by Enrico Letta in his report on the single market to sort of push for a fully working capital market by looking at savings and investments. I think both approaches are good. The important thing is of course that we continue taking down the barriers that disable a fully functioning single market also when it comes to banking services because that would give greater scaling opportunities. But is it a matter of having a single kind of capital market? Because in banking it seems like one bank needs to go

bankrupt before it can be taken over by somebody else right like we saw in Switzerland. Credit Suisse basically went bust before UBS could buy it and so the biggest European bank now is I think number 20 worldwide. You know we basically don't have any champions. Well we have not had, we've not assessed bank mergers that I can remember. What we have seen is the recovery of a banking sector, which was very heavily hit by the financial crisis. I think to some degree, challenged by digitization and getting their customers used to do all their banking digitally. And I think that may be one of the factors holding back that it has taken longer in Europe to recover from the financial crisis than for

instance in the US. After the Ukrainian situation, we had a gas supply issue in Europe with Gazprom. How do you assess why we ended up in a situation like that, which was so concentrated on the supply side? Because it was cheap. We wanted that cheap energy because for obvious reasons that works very well as an input to your industry. And I think we didn't realize that there was a price to pay to get cheap energy.

And the price that we paid was our security and the security of our neighbors. So I think that it was an unfortunate but seemingly necessary wake-up call that we need to assess the full price of our supplies to have an open transparent assessment that if we want things cheap, if there is a security premium to be paid. Now we have diversified the gas supply, both pipeline gas and LNG, and the LNG infrastructure has been built up very, very fast. So we have, I think, 10, 12 prime suppliers to rely on, and that's a much more healthy structure than what we had before. That has happened within a few years

because obviously gas is a crucial energy input and will remain so for a number of years. It's lower in carbon than oil and coal. So it's a good transition fuel for a number of reasons. And I think it's a very good example of the fact that when faced with an urgent crisis, Europe can move fast, as it has been done in this situation. Is there a chance that we could end up in a similar situation with batteries or solar panels given that we are now so dependent on China?

That is a huge risk. I do hope that we will learn from what we see as the Chinese playbook on how the solar panel industry was de facto moved to China within a relatively short time frame, de facto moved to China within a relatively short time frame, starting with joint ventures in China, joint ventures taking over by China, the Chinese market closing, the Chinese market working as a building ground for a

solar panel industry. Now with a huge production at very low cost, making it very difficult, if not impossible, for European producers to be competitive. And we should make sure that this does not happen if you look, for instance, at our wind industry. Very important European wind producers who are faced with fierce competition by the Chinese using more or less the same playbook but luckily not so advanced yet. So I think that will be a very important area of concern. You might know that we have something called the foreign subsidies regulation. So we can look for instance at tendering if we fear that there's been foul play.

So it's not a competitive tender but it's a tender based on subsidies from third countries. Then we can investigate and we're doing that right now. And I think that might be an effective way of making sure that unfair competition do not take a hold. It's been a massive change in the geopolitical situation since you took over this job. How has it changed the way you have to think? I should give one example. We made in the last year of the Juncker Commission, so six years ago, a China strategy with three different elements. So partnership on fighting climate change, competition on economic matters, rivalry when it comes to the governing system.

We are democracy. We do not consider them a democracy. What we have seen over the last year is that two of the legs have grown very much together, economic competition and systemic rivalry, which has made us be much more focusing on economic security, which is sort of the answer to the fact that systemic rivalry and economic competition becomes two sides of the same coin. And for economic security, it's a very broad effort. It's about export controls, but it's also about our research and innovation organizations. Do they do the due diligence to know if students, PhD students, if they are who they say they are?

And if they come here for the right reasons, or if they de facto come here to do what you could call sort of industrial espionage or research espionage. So it's a far-reaching effort, especially in a number of critical technologies, you know, AI, semiconductors, biotech, a number of sectors actually. And that is, I think, a very prudent answer to the fact that the geopolitics have become much more hostile than what they were 10 years ago. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question? Because you are standing in the middle of these massive decisions with the most powerful companies in the world trying to convince you in all different types of directions. How does it feel to be the head of this? Well, I think it would be very lonely if it wasn't for the amazing people that I work with.

And it would feel maybe also a bit in vain if I didn't look at the people that we serve. Sometimes I'm in a meeting and the person on the other side of the table makes I don't know how many times more than I would ever do. And his business may have a turnover that is the same as a smaller European member state. And you know, mentally, sometimes I'm giving this advice that you should people, you should picture people naked. I never do that because maybe you cannot unsee that mental image and I think that's unhealthy. So instead what I picture is that I have the 450 million Europeans having my back. You know, we have this discussion about crowd sizes and,

and you know, that is my crowd size. That is what I'm thinking about when I'm in such a meeting. And then for me mentally, that's, that is balancing things out. But yeah, you have a crowd size, but I mean, you still have the biggest companies in the world trying to lobby you, you know, you have the big nations, you have the big geopolitical powers and so on. What is the toughest thing you have experienced? Well, I think when I find that things are tough, is if there is a lack of respect of the legitimacy of the laws that we have. We have a well-functioning democracy.

We have well-functioning ways of drafting legislation, discussing legislation, passing legislation. When I find that, when I question our world order is if a business may be gigantic, may be smaller, says, yeah, but I don't care about your rules. Because if businesses with this kind of power goes rogue, then we have a problem. I haven't seen that in full, but sometimes I see a tendency of that. And that, of course, is extremely worrying for our democracy. How do you relax? What's the key to you having a bit of a hygge? Haha. I will run.

I try to do that every second day. I'm not always successful, but I try to do that. And I'm a very eager knitter. And I find that, you know, a lot of the work that I do is based on words. I listen a lot. I talk a lot. I read a lot. I talk a lot. I read a lot. So, you know, producing something with my hands and the feeling of yarn, of wool, silk, alpaca, you know, that is a, I

think, a very soothing, grounding thing for me to do. It's a pity that you cannot wear more than one sweater at a time because I'm quite productive. What do you read? I read novels. It's really rare that I read sort of leadership literature because since leadership is about people, I find that a novel is a way to learn about people that I would never ever meet, that I would not have a chance to get close to, I would not be able to get under their

skin. So I find that is really important for me. I just read a book which is, I'm in the process of reading a book of a Finnish writer called Kjell Västö. It is Skomväng, Eat No Fur. So it's Dusk 41. I don't actually know what is the English title. So it takes place under the Second World War. It's a man and a woman's perspective. They take turns. They are in a relationship. And it's very telling, both of the historical situation of the Finnish geography when it

comes to wars. They have had so many, they've been so tough on them. And how people respond to war. So even though it takes place during the Second World War, it's it's a very moving, touching, insightful recollection of how people react to war. a recollection of how people react to war. Also those who are not directly a soldier or faced with it. So I would highly recommend it.

I will order it straight away. Now, what advice do you have to young people? I think they are in a difficult situation because they have, I think as we all have had the uncertainty, am I good enough? How do I look? Do they see my weaknesses? Do I have a social network? All that has been accelerated and I think on speed because of quite a number of things.

And unfortunately I don't think that we're done dealing with the pandemic yet. I think for young people it has taken a hold that adults have, we have moved on, but I think it's taken a hold in many young people. So I think the most important thing is to say, you're not alone. We adults, we're here for you. You have friends, you have, there are other young people who are in the same situation. Don't think that you're alone.

We want to listen to you, we want to help you, we rely on you for our society to change. And even if you feel alone and you have anxieties and you have challenges, society needs you. I think that is an important message to any young generation. Wonderful. That's a very nice place to end. It's been fantastic talking to you. Big thanks for all your important work and all the best going forward. Well thank you very much and thank you for the podcast. I enjoyed very much myself. So

I think that's also part of the transparency of how people think in different walks of life. So thank you very much. Absolutely. think in different walks of life. So thank you very much.