EU Competition Chief Warns Against New Regulations for Internet Companies

By Tom Fairless

LONDON--The European Union should be wary of creating new regulations targeting large internet companies like Google Inc. (GOOGL) and Facebook Inc. (FB), the bloc's antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said Thursday, arguing that the bloc should seek to enforce existing antitrust laws to keep big companies in check.

Senior EU officials have floated a plan to create a new EU-wide regulator for a swath of mainly U.S.-based Internet companies, amid concerns that some of these firms are obstructing access to key online markets, according to an internal document seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Speaking at an event in London, Ms. Vestager said it would be "tricky" to design EU regulation targeting the various large Internet firms like Facebook, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and eBay Inc. (EBAY) because it was hard to establish what they had in common besides "facilitating something."

She stressed that her agency already has strong tools to tackle abuses by large Internet companies. The EU filed formal antitrust charges against Google in April over its search practices in Europe and has also opened an investigation into possible barriers that some companies may have created to cross-border electronic commerce in Europe.

New EU regulation aimed at reining in large Internet companies would take years to create and would then address historic rather than future problems, Ms. Vestager said.

"We need to think about what it is we want to achieve that can't be achieved by enforcing competition law," Ms. Vestager said.

Much of the behavior by Internet firms, she added, was "very ordinary," indicating that the EU didn't require new tools to address it.

"They want to make more money than their competitors, some want a competitor not to be there," she said.

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