German antitrust head sees divergence in rhetoric with US peers, not in substance

By Foo Yun Chee

BERLIN (Reuters) -Germany's antitrust head Andreas Mundt on Monday addressed mounting concerns about the deviation in approaches between European regulators and their U.S. peers, saying the divergence is more in terms of rhetoric than substance.

Such worries have been amplified in recent months by U.S government and lawmakers' criticism of EU scrutiny of Big Tech and fines levied on U.S. companies for breaching EU rules.

Mundt said feedback that he has received from the markets, speeches by antitrust officials and conferences suggested there could be some grandstanding involved.

"I think that divergence that we often talk about is more rhetoric and maybe competition policy is one of the rare branches where we have more convergence in substance between the Biden and Trump administrations than we had before," he told a conference organised by ECA Economics.

Both the European Commission and U.S. antitrust regulators are cracking down on Big Tech, demanding in some cases a breakup of lucrative units core to the companies' businesses.

Mundt also took aim at EU telecoms operators demanding looser merger rules such as reviewing their deals on a pan-European level rather than national level and to give more weight to their investments.

"I generally agree with the Draghi report but not in telecoms," he said, referring to a wide-ranging study by former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi aimed at boosting Europe's competitiveness.

"To define the telecoms market at an EU level would make market definition completely artificial and fictional. As long as you have something like 26 regulation regimes, it would be very hard to define an EU-wide market," Mundt said.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; editing by David Evans)