How Europe Is Finally Taking On Silicon Valley

The European Commission -- the executive body of the EU -- wants to supercharge its sluggish startup scene and cultivate a generation of Skypes that don’t emigrate to America. But that also means wresting control of the European tech market back from Silicon Valley’s biggest power players, which have dominated the region for decades with little local competition. Google, for example, controls nearly 93 percent of all online searches in Europe. Compare that to the US, where Google faces some competition from Yahoo and Bing and accounts for 80 percent of searches. So far, the European Commission's most aggressive moves are mostly stuck in regulatory limbo and ongoing investigations, but some US tech giants, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, have already begun to make changes in reaction to the new landscape. Silicon Valley, because new E.U.-wide standards would help it overcome the other legal challenges to its businesses. But US companies may need to tread more lightly in Europe than they have in the past, as Margrethe Vestager, Europe's new antitrust chief who initiated formal investigations into Google and Amazon, has shown that she will not hesitate to bring charges against any US firm that gets too powerful.