On the morning of September 28, Europe’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager met with one of the people leading the crusade to reduce the market dominance of big tech companies around the world.
Brendan Carr, the senior republican at US regulator the Federal Communications Commission, was trying to rally support for his campaign to make technology giants such as Google and Netflix pay struggling telecoms companies on both sides of the Atlantic for the huge investments they are making in their networks.
Such efforts to compel tech companies to make what proponents term a “fair contribution” to network costs are far from new, the debate having rumbled on for a decade.