Emmanuel Macron has waded into a growing row over the appointment of an American to a role at the heart of the EU directorate that oversees the regulation of big US tech companies including Apple and Google.
Fiona Scott Morton, a former Obama administration anti-trust official, was appointed by the EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager last week, prompting strong criticism from French politicians including the foreign minister, Catherine Colonna, who urged the EU to reconsider her appointment.
Vestager’s directorate is considered one of the most powerful in Brussels in relation to big US tech companies.
It recently charged Google with abusing its dominant position, warning it may have to sell part of its lucrative adtech business to address concerns about anticompetitive practices.
At a summit in Brussels the French president said on Tuesday that he found arguments for Morton’s appointment “dubious”.
Macron raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest, given consultancy work she had undertaken for a number of US tech companies in the past, and questioned whether the EU needed to cross the Atlantic for the appointment.
“Isn’t there a European researcher who can do this job?” he asked. “If that’s the conclusion we’re drawing, it’s extremely worrying, and we need to invest massively in the academic systems of our economies.”
He claimed an equivalent appointment of a foreign national would be blocked in the US.
“I would be open to seeing the USA recruit a European into the White House to be at the heart of White House decision, or the Chinese doing the same. I note, moreover, that the law would have prevented them from doing so,” he said.
Scott Morton will be both the first US national and first woman appointed to the job.
She holds a chair as professor of economics at the Yale School of Management and is affiliated with the University of Edinburgh. She is also a senior consultant to Charles River Associates, a consultancy that advises a number of tech companies.
She will play a key role in the EU competition enforcer’s investigations into Google, Apple, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft, as well as high-profile mergers such as Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot and Adobe’s Figma deal.
Macron said he had a “lot of respect” for Scott Morton but said if she ever had to recuse herself from important decisions it would weaken her role.
“If she has to take a back seat, to distance herself from so many subjects? There you have it, all the questions I ask myself, which make me dubious about these issues,” said Macron.
Le Monde newspaper sharply criticised the appointment, describing it in an editorial as “shocking” and “problematic” given the “sensitive position in a directorate general where the notion of sovereignty is central”.
But the French economist and Nobel prize winner Jean Tirole told Politico that the European Commission and “more broadly, us Europeans are very lucky to have drawn someone of her calibre”, describing her as one of the “best economists in the world in the domain of industrial organisation”.
Macron has been at the forefront of initiatives in Europe to build “autonomy” in the bloc’s economy, weakening its reliance on the US or China for defence and critical raw materials.
“Europeans need to develop European skills, to have strategic autonomy … and when I talk about strategic autonomy, you need to have autonomy of thought … You have to train minds, you have to use them and you have to recognise them … give them a role, draw consequences … it’s not really the most coherent decision,” he told reporters.
