Wikileaks cable shows early US hopes over Kroes
The US embassy in The Hague greeted Neelie Kroes's appointment as competition commissioner in 2004 by suggesting she might soothe tensions between EU regulators and US-based big business, a cable published by Wikileaks has revealed.
Kroes, who left the post at the start of 2010 to become digital agenda commissioner, ended up forcing Microsoft to change its browser-bundling policies. Also while in charge of antitrust regulation at the European Commission, Kroes hit Intel with a record €1bn fine for the various illegal practices it employed to ensure its dominance in the processor market.
However, the cable published last week, and originally sent to Washington on 16 August 2004, indicated that Kroes was seen as friendlier to US interests than perhaps turned out to be the case.
"Kroes' reputation as a free-market and pro-Atlantic thinker could be a real plus for soothing tensions in the US-EU relationship," the cable noted, adding that there was a chance her appointment might "open an era of dialogue between Brussels and wary big business".
Both the Intel and Microsoft cases were kicked off by Kroes's predecessor as competition commissioner, Mario Monti, but both were aggressively pursued and won on the Dutch politician's watch.
Despite those victories over US-based big business, Kroes has also frequently displayed admiration for US technology companies and their success. On Monday, she blogged about a visit to Silicon Valley, and how the visit "underlines what a dynamic place this is and what entrepreneurial strength it has".
"Silicon Valley offers a lot of insights for Europe," Kroes wrote. "We should not try to replicate it, but we can learn from its example, and devise our own models. We need to inject a more entrepreneurial culture in our universities; invest in stronger trans-European networks of researchers, venture capital, and entrepreneurs; and stimulate our 'old' multinationals and incumbents to be more innovation friendly and to embrace, not fight, new technologies and disruptive business models."