Compliance Toolkit

Europe asserts its right to regulate

Tags:
Regulate,
Europe,
US,
Intel

Evan Hansen and Declan McCullagh CNET News

Published: 11 Jun 2004 10:40 BST

More alike than different?
Monti himself, who has become a lightning rod for criticism of his commission's decisions, has taken pains to emphasise that recent trends have led to greater overlap between US and EU competition law, rather than less.

"Put simply, the EU and US agree on what competition policy should be all about," he said in February, according to a copy of a speech posted on the commission's Web site. "We both agree that the ultimate purpose of our respective intervention in the marketplace should be to ensure that consumer welfare is not harmed."

Such assurances aside, many officials in Washington have expressed concerns about the European Union's increasing interest in targeting American companies. Immediately after Monti ruled in March that Microsoft violated antitrust laws, US politicians slammed the ruling as anticonsumer and overly regulatory.

The strongest denunciation came in a floor speech by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist who said: "I now fear that the United States and EU are heading toward a new trade war -- and that the commission's ruling against Microsoft is the first shot."

Ten members of the House Committee on International Relations -- five Democrats and five Republicans -- wrote a letter to Monti, protesting the sanctions on Microsoft. They claimed that the decision violated the spirit of a 1991 "comity agreement" the Clinton administration renewed in 1998, which generally says the United States should take the lead in overseeing US companies.

Another point of contention is that US officials sometimes view Europeans as unabashed fans of big government. In November 2001, William Kolasky, deputy assistant attorney general at the time, complained in a speech that the "European Union comes from a more statist tradition that places greater confidence in the utility of governmental intervention in markets."

On Monday, R. Hewitt Pate, the current Justice Department antitrust chief, spoke at a conference in Brussels, Belgium, where he elaborated on the differences between US and European antitrust philosophies. Europeans are more ready to declare that a company has a "dominant position," Pate says, while Americans have "a more Darwinian view of the competition process."