Europe’s battle to curb Big Tech

US tech giants Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have been accused of not paying enough taxes, stifling competition, stealing media content and threatening democracy by spreading fake news.

As Italy hit Amazon with a massive 1.1-billion-euro ($1.3-billion) antitrust fine Thursday for abusing its market dominance, we look at how Europe has tried to regulate Big Tech:

Nobbling competition

The digital giants -- collectively dubbed GAFAM -- are regularly criticised for dominating the market by elbowing out rivals.

The European Union has slapped a total 8.25 billion euros in fines on Google for abusing its dominant market position across several of its products. 

Last month the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg confirmed a 2.4-billion-euro fine imposed in 2017 for abusing its power over its rivals in online shopping. Microsoft was fined 561 million euros by the EU in 2013 for imposing its search engine Internet Explorer on users of Windows 7.

Amazon, Apple and Facebook are also the targets of EU probes for possible violations of competition rules.

The EU has also unveiled plans for mammoth fines of up to 10 percent of sales on tech firms that break competition rules, which could even lead to them being broken up.

Taxation

Germany, France, Italy and Spain won a major victory in June when the Group of Seven (G7) agreed to a minimum global corporate tax rate of at least 15 percent mainly aimed at the tech giants.

For years they have paid little or no tax through complex tax avoidance schemes.

In one of the most notorious cases, the European Commission in 2016 found that Ireland granted “illegal tax benefits to Apple” and ordered the company to pay 13 billion euros plus interest to the Irish taxpayer.

After an EU court later ruled in favour of Apple, the commission turned to the European Court of Justice to appeal.

The following year, Amazon was told to pay back 250 million euros to Luxembourg over similar alleged abuses there, though the EU General Court cancelled that in May this year. An appeal will be examined by the European Court of Justice.