{"id":7117,"date":"2017-11-28T08:08:03","date_gmt":"2017-11-28T08:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7117"},"modified":"2017-11-28T08:08:03","modified_gmt":"2017-11-28T08:08:03","slug":"margrethe-vestager","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2017\/11\/28\/margrethe-vestager\/","title":{"rendered":"Margrethe Vestager"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If I have a contemporary hero it would be\u00a0Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner for competition who is proving a scourge of those bent on global dominance; that is, the IT mega corporations. \u00a0They may not pay their taxes, but they do pay her fines. \u00a0As the Times noted the other day ...<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Last year, she ruled that Ireland must collect \u20ac13bn from Apple which had benefited from illegal tax breaks that gave it an unfair competitive advantage.<\/li>\n<li>In May, she fined Facebook \u20ac110m for providing misleading information to the European Commission about its WhatsApp takeover.<\/li>\n<li>In June, she slapped Google with a \u20ac2.42bn penalty for abusing its position as the dominant search engine to promote its own shopping service.<\/li>\n<li>In October, she fined Amazon \u20ac250m for benefiting from another illegal tax break; and, announced Ireland is to be hauled before the European Court of Justice because it is still dragging its feet over collecting the \u20ac13bn \u2014 \u201cplus interest\u201d \u2014 owed by Apple.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>She has an 800-strong team [800!] which, Vestager insists is merely applying the free market principles set out over 60 years ago by the founders of the EU. \u00a0Like me, she avoids Google and uses DuckDuckGo as her search engine (it does not store personal data), and she deletes cookies every few days, as should we all. \u00a0The price of liberty is still eternal scepticism and vigilance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If I have a contemporary hero it would be\u00a0Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner for competition who is proving a scourge of those bent on global dominance; that is, the IT mega corporations. \u00a0They may not pay their taxes, but they...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}