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11 tweets,
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1. Tech companies are in for a wild ride in Europe. @vestager is back and she is loaded for bear. As @ANewman_forward and I describe inOf Privacy and Power - amazon.com/Privacy-Power-… - Vestager helped to shape new approach to regulating tech companies
2. In the book, we quote @bendrath, who describes how Vestager came to be convinced that a new model of technology regulation was needed. The power of technology platforms companies doesn't precisely fit into standard regulatory categories. 
3. Clearly, antitrust policy is implicated, as @linamkhan and others have aptly demonstrated. Tech companies are able to leverage their platforms to dominate markets using both traditional and non-traditional tools. This also worries Silicon Valley thinkers like @timoreilly
4. Privacy policy is also crucial. Platform companies' current business models require systematically pushing the boundaries of individual privacy. The repeated privacy scandals involving Facebook and Google aren't accidental - they are the product of basic business imperatives.
5. Consumer protection is being transformed, as platform companies become the lens through which consumers see the world. The transformation of Google search over the last decade, from unobtrusive sidebar ads to a system where the actual search results are increasingly buried.
6. The fundamental issues for democracy of a system in which the key ways in which people talk with each other are controlled by semi-monopoly platforms, whose profit making algorithms are often inimical to good democratic speech, as @zeynep and others have described.
7. What @vestager and others in Europe have decided is that these interlocking problems require a common approach and common tools to address. One cannot think of privacy, consumer protection, antitrust etc as distinct policy realms; the spillovers are just too big and important.
8. This transformation in policy understanding happened a couple of years ago; now, under the new Commission's allocation of authority, @vestager has more of the tools that she wanted in order to prosecute it. The likely consequences: a far more activist Europe on tech issues.
9. This is also likely to reinforce the move towards understanding economic issues in political terms that @ANewman_forward and I describe in our work on #weaponizedinterdependence - mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.11… It's been fascinating to see the takeup of our ideas in Europe.
10. suggesting a long pent-up demand for arguments that help to bridge the complex worlds of technology, economics and politics that the new economy has brought together. To be clear: there are likely also to be problems with the new European approach.
11. As we have already seen, the push to control flows of content can be hijacked e.g. by IP interests looking to protect monopolies. But the core point - that all these issues are mutually reinforcing - is unassailably true. Big tech companies should watch out.
