European Commission, Europe Fit for Digital Age, VP Margrethe Vestager | Full Interview | Code 2021

[Music] so i want to start off i guess i have to start off with an easy one for you instagram for kids not for my kids not for your kids no so talk a little bit about this the idea of what facebook is doing now um pulling back on the idea of teen toxicity and pausing can you talk a little bit about this issue and how you're thinking about it as a commissioner well we're going to ask everyone with that kind of service to make sort of a horizontal risk assessment is my services putting something at risk that is you know dear to us that could be uh democracy uh could be mental health and if i find that as a business i'll have the obligation to mitigate those risks right do you think they are doing a very good job of it well you know we would like things to solve itself right that would be great but uh now we have you know important pieces of legislation in front of the european parliament and the european council and of course we wouldn't have done that if businesses they were on the job themselves all right so talk about that legislation we did an interview six months ago i guess um talk about where they are because not everything you've done has succeeded they've pushed back rather heavily they're focused on lena khan right now in that regard so talk about the legislation and where you think your weaknesses are and the successes of what you're doing well i think the main weaknesses in any piece of legislation is whether or not it's implementable so we're really trying to focus on on bad behaviors that we know of from the antitrust cases or from unfair market practices and i'd say you know both parliament and council is quite enthusiastic about it uh the french they really pushing because they would want that to be one of the results of their presidency so if we are you know really hard working and working for luck as well then we may be able to pass it uh the coming spring so it would take effect by the first of january 2022 explain what that visa legislation is going to do well it puts an obligation on what we call gatekeepers and and gatekeeper is sort of a a term to say well you have that kind of power in the marketplace that basically you decide who can do business who cannot and if you are then labeled a gatekeeper you have a number of deuce and a number of dents those could be give people their data enable that there could be a second app store don'ts could be don't lean in on other people in neighboring markets don't promote yourself be prudent so a lot of the things we know from the antitrust work to put that into legislation so you have to abide to it at all times and who gets this designated gatekeeper how are you going to decide this oh you're going to be big uh it could be you know thousands and thousands of uh end users thousands and thousands of business users and we have made sort of this great to say well this is the proxy for the kind of market power that we're looking for do you feel i want you to reflect on gdpr and whether you think it's been successful some people feel like the big companies they've only become more powerful richer more entrenched and it's hurt the smaller companies talk a little bit about the success of that and whether what you would do differently now thinking about what's happened since i think the main success of gdpr is that now privacy is a thing if if we had not passed this kind of legislation i think we would still be in the dark when it comes to having digital citizens rights and i think it's really important that we sort of enlarge our thinking about what are citizens rights in a digital world because it's not the same so i think that's that's the main success uh where we still have a lot of work to do is to make it easier for the smaller business to live up to it and we need the market to deliver better sort of privacy by default privacy enhancing solutions we need more digital assistance to remember your cookie preferences so that you don't have to be bothered all the time right so when you think about this idea of introducing privacy there still isn't privacy legislation in this country where these companies exist how do you look at the us which has moved zero since you've been doing all this legislation well i have i have registered a lot of a movement in sort of in how you look at technology okay when i was new in the job as commissioner for competition uh working up and down the hill with my first google case under my arm it was like who's that crazy woman yeah now you have six seven pieces of legislation tabled they are by uh by members of both chambers there is a completely different alignment of thinking so i think it's only a question of time before you'd see you know real alignments uh between democracies on this planet europe the u.s india canada australia japan everyone is now coming on board what does that look like then what legislation has to be passed well obviously we need privacy legislation every one of us needs to have digital citizens rights uh second i think it's it's an absolute given that you must reign in uh the big companies in order to have a contestable what does that mean reign in because you said you're not against big companies you're against big companies who don't follow the rules correct exactly okay and this is why since it seems to be a bit difficult to figure out what are the rules to make that so much clearer because what we see now is that the market is not contestable this is why we call it a gatekeeper someone else then your success your ingenuity your services towards your customers is deciding whether or not you can find your customers and and that is you know the first thing in any fair market that it's up to you it's your marriage that decides whether or not i'm successful right you're successful so what has to be passed here and when you say they're coming together they have different attitudes but nothing actually passes nothing ever happens biden has named three people who you know well timo lina khan um and john cantor when is the time when it actually happens here when you look at it because you've got to work closely with them presumably well it's difficult for me to say because even though i i watch quite a lot of uh of late night satire still their exact timing and workings of of of your democracy is really difficult for a european it's really difficult for an american go ahead i'm happy that you're saying that yeah um so i i won't know your timing but if i look at the proposals tabled i'd find elements of of our proposals in there as well in more proposals we have these we have three main ones digital services act did to markets act and act on ai in order to be able to trust it and i see the same thinking just in many more proposals so what will be uh sort of the next step in the process i wouldn't know but i see the willingness and also a bar part wasn't there before willingness that didn't exist before so when you're looking at the impact the pandemic the only companies that came out better than ever and in fact stronger were tech companies they're more powerful than ever they're richer than ever they have more lobbyists than ever what is that what what does that pose for you as a regulator well i think it was there's another side to that coin as well because a lot of people all of a sudden realized oh in order for us to do our job to make our business flourish we're in the hands of giant companies in order for our children to learn we're in the hands of these companies so i think it was part also of the effects of change public opinion that there is a job that needs to get done by our legislator in order to get this right uh and the second thing of course is in in europe there are huge differences of course everyone in hospitality they have suffered enormously but a lot of business in in the manufacturing industry you know they have been doing quite well uh and they are now in the process of digitalizing so people also see that digitization is moving on the next big chapter is opening and that of course is also why the timing of making sure that the market is open and contestable that timing is now so when you look at some of the cases i love your thoughts on because you have legislation around app stores and a point of view the apple epic fight here you must be watching closely talk a little bit about that yeah what is uh i think for every one of us if we're not happy with the prices or or the choice in in a store we'd go to the store next door that option you don't have on on your phone and um we have complaints about the the conditions of the apple app store both that you have to pay a fee of 30 also when when apple is competing with the services and that you have these anti-staring provisions so you cannot get in touch with your customers and say oh you can get this 30 cheaper by signing up somewhere else so we follow of course very closely uh what happens after the judgments uh both on on the market definition where we have a slightly different take on that yeah uh but also uh what will actually be the follow-up because i think the reading of the judgment from our side is that both parties uh had a partly win yeah so the really interesting thing for us is now what will this judgment actually mean that some of these provisions the fee the anti-steering will go away or and that's open so what do you think of the judgment that they're not a monopolist well this is difficult for us to see because here there's a different legislation that we would have and for us that depends on the market because we'd say well this is an aftermarket when you bought your phone well there's an aftermarket and and here the app store has a monopoly because you can it's de facto monopoly because it's really difficult to go somewhere else so in the market definition if if you look at the so that we have sent the statement objection that we have sent to apple you'd find these differences embedded so when you think about what has to happen in these things they will move along by cases and all kinds of things when you one of the things you do a lot is fining and taxing some of which have been overturned do you have other tools because you you've suffered losses yeah i can tell you it's a different thing to think that you take a risk of losing in court and then actually doing it yeah second part hurts much more um so the cases uh that we are lost they are under appeal uh in the european court of justice so remains to be seen what will be the final outcome the thing is that for all these many businesses who pay their taxes i think it's only fair that they see that we do what we can to make their competitors pay their taxes as well okay and this is of course why we do what we can in the international negotiations will be really interesting to see if we can pull through uh this autumn with an international agreement both on the floor and yelling had talked about this yeah both on the floor of corporate taxation but also with the distribution of taxing rights so that businesses pay taxes where they create their value do you think her statements were superficial or real this time because this has not come out of the u.s this idea about a goal no but you know i don't know if i can you know pride myself of knowing her but i have i have met her and i find her to be you know genuine and truthful uh in this and you know there has been a complete turnaround with the change of administration when it comes to saying it's important that you pay your taxes so you have a u.s eu inaugural meeting you're here for this correct the training no i'm here for you okay sorry and the treatment and technology council is this week in pittsburgh so what's the goal of this meeting right now again this is the first time you've done this yeah when we've not had such a thing before and uh and the idea is to have sort of a high level forum where we can discuss things related to trade and technology right and hopefully to find alignment one of the things really dear to me is that we find alignment on artificial intelligence because in order for that you know enormous potential to be unleashed we need to be able to trust it and right now i think there has been too many cases where you see bias where you see that the use cases well there is a discrimination against women people with a minority background and i think we need to move forward in democracies to change that because otherwise artificial intelligence will be turned against us do you feel like it's too late in that area there's only a few companies who control this no but it's it's it's indeed about time because very soon it will be overdue also because we see different uses of artificial intelligence uses that we would think they are against the fundamentals of a democracy where the starting point is the integrity and the dignity of the individual and and it may sound trivial but to put it into effect takes actually quite some ingenuity right so when you look around at misinformation disinformation which is also grown during this time it's the pandemic or it was the election what can regulators like you do i find it impossible to figure out what to do here except perhaps burn it down saying this architecture is rotten let's start with another one do you think like that i wouldn't be a very good regulator obviously no i don't think like that uh my first that's because you knit go ahead yeah but it makes you grounded okay um no my first thought is that humans have been lying probably even before we learned to speak with one another you know the mammoth is over there and then you're trying to get it yourself never successful also catching mammoths seems to be a teamwork but that being said you know the spreads and the scope of disinformation of lying is a completely different feature today than what what it was just five ten years ago so what we are asking is to first to make a system that allows you to take down but also to allow people to get back at you because obviously the gray zone is important everyone knows that we don't want child pornography or bum recipes or excitement to terror but the gray zone is the interesting territory where platforms will have to do much more in order not only to take things down but also allow people to say well this is hurtful we know it yes but it is actually legal and that is the push that we're doing right now with that piece of legislation called the digital services act you think that will be the solution because this stuff floods everywhere in every aspect and they're all related to each other but i think it's quite difficult to shut down how do you push back on the idea that it's censorship well of course we we accept that some things decided in our democracy that we don't want it we don't want child pornography we don't want excitement to terrorism we don't want hate speech because we think that the dignity is important that we do not call censorship that that we think is natural in a democracy that that kind of decisions can be made so what we're trying to do is to say well in in the gray zone between something what is exactly hate speech what is exactly excitement to terrorism here you need processes to enable people to come back if something has been taken down but we also need that horizontal risk assessment the services that i offer is there a risk that they will be conquered by people who want to spread lies to actually de facto excite to terrorism uh that they pose a risk to people's mental health because then you have the responsibility to mitigate it in the way your platform is working so but when they haven't done that they're interested in growth they say people should do whatever they want how do you change that attitude from your perspective well only by only by imposing this responsibility and making it enforceable and when enforceable also to be able to to hand out fines and in repeated cases also to do structural remedies which basically means to say well you may have to split up your company they don't like that doesn't seem so no so do you think that's going to happen splitting up what you that you have the political will or power to do so well the reason why we have not been there yet is that we have not had the cases uh to do it and of course i would like companies to follow the legislation rather than to be compete offenders and putting themselves in the territory where structural remedies splitting up would be the consideration because as it is now we need real change as to how these services work as you say you know the spread of disinformation and lying is epidemic have you were you surprised by january 6th by what january 6 here yes i was surprised well i was because the u.s to me is a is an old democracy of course i see the debates about voting rights exclusion of voters but but these are our debate it's completely different thing to violently in invades uh your your democratic home so do you put how much of i don't say blame because it's not quite right how much of the impact of social media and technology had on that and what's happening now when you look around of course it has an impact but the other side is we were very happy with the average spring we're very happy when people can use social media also to organize an opposition against a system that wants to control them and this is why we have this idea that you need to assess the risk horizontally but you also need to give people a way to get back at you if too much is taken down to say well yes what i say may be harmful to you uh it's hurting but it's legal so it has its role and and that's the balance these are really really tricky issues so when you look at what you've done you became kind of a i i'm not saying you're a villain because i don't think you are but too to tech you were portrayed like that you you're quite reasonable actually in a lot of ways what do you when you look at that why do you think that happened the idea that you're sort of the tech killer well i think it kind of comes with the job uh as as commissioner for competition but you know basically i think our mission is so much bigger because to make sure that technology serves us not only as consumers but also as citizens this is now because otherwise our societies they will just completely drift into a situation where the huge majority of us we will just be pawns we we will not be part of the decision making and this is why basically now democracy is is saying this is that this is what we want we want to take these decisions out of closed border rooms and put them into democracy so that we can see societies develop by using tech and not because of tech so when you look at somewhere like china which is cracking down what do you think is happening there well it's it's quite opaque uh i must say so it's a bit tricky but my general approach would be to to let the chinese be chinese i think it would be a very poor chinese because they both when they do antitrust but also when they use technology they have a different approach uh you know some of the ways they use technology are some of the ways that we want to make absolutely forbidden surveillance surveillance by remote biometric identification the use of social scoring by states and governments uh the use of subliminal messaging because i think it's really important that we as citizens say well there is a use for technology and there is an area where there is no use for technology so what they're doing though is cutting the power of technology it was it's sort of like you on steroids in a weird way or amy klobuchar on steroids or something like that is there some things they're doing you think i'd like to be able to do that no actually never because one of our fundamentals is that our union is built on the rule of law and no matter what you think about someone doing something illegal or who might be doing something illegal they have the right to defend themselves and and that's a fundamental of course sometimes that slows down but it slows us down for the right reasons and now what i've learned in my first mandate as as commissioner for competition is that specific law enforcement is not enough we need to call in regulation for the two to work in combination otherwise we'll not get it right so when you look back um on the things that you uh that you wish you had done differently in that regard if you go back and correct it you didn't you had taxation some of it worked some of it didn't gdpr some it worked some of it didn't if you'd go back and do that what would you do differently if anything well it's tricky to be specific but i think i would have been bolder because we have so little time democracy is so fragile we have so little time to get it right and my fear is that citizen feel alienated i'm not in control i don't know what to do to get in control and other either i just throw myself completely into tech or i withdraw and empowerment to feel as a citizen empowered i am in control i know what i do that's that's the essence of a well-working society in my book and here we just we just click the boxes we just let go and we should not let go when it comes to something personal can you explain to people your use of technology oh i use a lot of technology yeah yeah i use it to wake me up in the morning i used it for the news and used to use it to stay connected with friends and and family what what companies do you use oh i use a lot of different companies um and i also see what how beneficial it is to be big because you know for instance when i use another search engine than the than the dominant one i see that it's called google it's called google yes but i would you know i don't think it should be a work okay um so when i use another service i see that it takes time for it to get to know me but i'm really to invest that time because i get a different sense of i'm in control what about delivery commerce yeah i i do that a lot so you use amazon no i don't okay because you know there are other other businesses yes there are i'm aware who do you use well it's quite varied um but you know we have so many smaller companies and they would use uh uh there's a german delivery company there is uh there's a number of different companies and their service is impeccable packable so you don't have to use amazon you do that as a matter sometimes i i need to to do a bit more effort to find what i want but then i get to know businesses that i would otherwise not have seen right and for me you know i convenience is kind of a curiosity killer that if you want to if you want to get the most also what the the web can offer you need to invest a bit of curiosity together and convenience basically kills that do you think we spend too much time being convenient way too much time and i think we would live or die to regret it because every time you get a bit of resistance at least that's how i feel it i learn a bit and i change my perspective and i like that i think that is part of meaning of life so if you had to think of the one thing that tech people think about you that getting it wrong what would it be well i'm actually i'm not a tech person i have i don't know how to code i took a course in the last millennium i have forgotten all about it i think the important thing here is that it's about society and and the use of technology and widening the community and that it's a hundred percent legitimate in a democracy that those of us who plays a role in there that it's a legitimate role so are you hopeful are you not oval it's gotten worse since we met i know but you know i think optimism is the only realistic option really yeah because pessimists never get anything done what if you're an optimistic pessimist well i think that's a workable position as well okay but do you feel um exhausted by it i'm always curious because no i feel encouraged wow we have we have things to do and you know the community is growing more and more people realize both the amazing things you can do with technology but also the absolute need for us as as citizens as consumers to say well this is the society we want to live in all right last question you're working on ai you're working on a bunch of privacy what is the thing your is in the corner of your eye that you have to pay attention to is in healthcare is it transportation um what worries you are you like huh i'm a little bit nervous about this well since we you know we would have a surveillance of all these different markets what worries me is is if we forget how it's like to be humans together and that has nothing to do with the market as such only when that becomes more and more digital well do you know how to get into a shop and get proper service and feel i'm now a consumer and do we know how to come together and build common culture instead of just sitting at home behind our screens you know not only do i love you and i want to come here because of that but i also want to come here because it's real it's people coming together and and i think that is what we should be worried about do you think people are going to go back to work go back to society this has been the biggest experiment in history and it worked yeah and that's great it's really really great and i think probably we could save every second business chip trip but we need to do the others because we need to be with one another we need to see the the gestures and and and the eyes and the smiles because you know zoom webex skype whatever they're called do you use any of them of course i do of course i do but my fear is that the risk was bigger of losing your sense of humor than your use your sense of smell and taste in this pandemic because ah the timing disappears someone is always muted and so there's never a feedback which also means that brainstorming disappears that negotiation becomes really really difficult because these are all you know core human competences and we need to come together to train it to be able to do it all right thank you marie the best question there's a trend you know around the world of saying we want the internet but then you know the regulations that the eu is proposing may seem you know really important we want safety we want this but other countries russia is using it to crack down on criticism other countries are shutting off the whole internet um is there a need for some sort of global agreement on what you know the is the internet a fundamental right and how do you take the good how do you keep it open and unique and the worldwide while still having regulations such an adela call it a geneva convention for deck yeah i think i think we do and we're pushing to get there we will try this autumn to make sort of uh a set of digital rights we have fundamental rights but we need to enlarge that and then we need democracies all over the planet to work together to create something like you're asking for so you know i have a closed conversation with my indian colleagues with japanese colleagues we keep tackle what is going on in australia and and we see more and more alignment and of course i do hope that within this framework of the tech and technology council that the us and and europe can sort of set the direction so that we get it right thank you okay over here hi thanks so much for being here and for your leadership on this um question about uh streaming the streaming market here in the united states is growing rapidly growing internationally curious is the commission committed to preserving competition for streaming as it has done so effectively well in other digital markets well in that i can i can answer without any kind of long detailed you know if and then the answer is yes it's pretty competitive right now though right correct yeah but it has to be competitive one of the worries that we have of course is that when we all get to to to streaming how to get news to you because in old flow tv days we would be ready having done the dishes made coffee ready with cookies the real type and and we would see the news and we would see the series and we would see you know a film and it would all be there for you so how to get the news to you you know old school curated journalistically uh driven news how to get that to you because that's the other part of democracy you need independent journalism also when it's really really inconvenient for those in power that's that's a worry when we see the streaming development but we need that to stay competitive because that gives us the best results um madam vice president how it's been over a decade since the european commission opened the original search investigation of google and google's market power is unchanged if anything it's it's more deeply entrenched you said that if you could have a do-over generally you would be bolder but specifically on google what advice would you give to your u.s counterparts the state attorney's general and doj as they prepare one uh i think there's now four trials that are about to begin on this and um and how do you and then generally how do you anticipate kind of collaborating with jonathan cantor and lena khan well i said uh to karen one of the things i learned was that sort of the specific case-by-case competition law enforcement is not enough because we see maybe not exactly the same but then kind of the same maneuvering we just made a sector inquiry to look into internet of things for consumers and we see for instance with voice assistance we see sort of similar trends as we see in the specific competition cases and and i don't think we can go to where we want to go without the cases but it's not enough we need regulation as well the two must help one another and it must come in parallel because otherwise we lose way too much time i'm really you know encouraged looking forward uh to also meet in person uh my new colleagues over here and i think the signaling from president biden with his executive order on competition i think that kind of signaling is what is encouraging everyone who thinks that fair competition should be the rule in the marketplace okay last question because she's got to get on a plane great thank you very much um david chavern at the news media alliance and thank you for the shout out for independent journalism i'll make it quick and then i can get to shireen quickly okay uh real quick um responsibility for algorithmic decision making so when you uh you're the news feed facebook decides what to see google decides what's seen the search result that is their decisions often automated decisions but theirs not yours of mine the the question the debate here about who's what responsibilities attached to those decisions it's somewhat warped by 230 but you don't get that you don't have 230 in europe and i was wondering if there's a way you can talk about how you think about their responsibility for their decisions well i i think they have responsibilities both in the specifics but also horizontally like if if an algorithm decides what news to sit you see well the the first thing is that you should be told this is an algorithm building on what you saw before that shows you this second uh sets this horizontal responsibility uh and part of of the questions to be asked here is are we you know chasing people down rabbit holes or are we giving them what an old school omnibus paper would give you you know insights on things you were never interested in uh you know i've learned so much about football by reading normal papers i would never look for it myself so now i take an interest and i think that point is one of the points that has to be considered when you get this obligation to have a horizontal assessment as to how are my services actually working when you get to that level when your services become part of the infrastructure of society interesting you're not going to get me to like sports very quick in light of the recent wall street journal reporting on facebook withholding its internal research about the effects of its platform has that changed your view of the company and what should regulators do when they feel that companies are not being forthcoming or even lying to politicians but maybe i have not ever been a total fan um and we have we have quite um strong tools to ask for information when we do our case work and it's because that we cannot do our case work in full respect of due process without also getting information from businesses and i think it's really important when you have that kind of role that you are indeed very forthcoming with your insights as to how things are working we will be asking for more openness also when that wizard researchers can get the kind of of data uh that we're talking about here uh in order to have a proper assessments uh what is on gohu and in order to evaluate if the businesses are living up to what hopefully will be their new obligations okay great murray thank you so much we had a lot more questions it was a pleasure to be here thank you very much for having me you

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Length: 40min 39sec (2439 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021