'Is the internet necessary?' - The question that could change the world

If Google is seen as an essential part of life then it could be regulated like a telecommunications company. Photo/123RF.

The European Union's antitrust chief is weighing whether internet services are essential to modern life in the same way as electricity grids and telecommunications suppliers - a potentially game-changing question for technology giants such as Google and Facebook.

EU officials are trying to understand in-depth whether the internet is "approaching something that we would call an essential facility", EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager told reporters in The Hague. She didn't name any specific companies.

Declaring Google's search engine or Facebook's social network as essential facilities would expand the boundaries of antitrust enforcement in Europe, possibly allowing regulators to set strict curbs on online platforms to protect businesses and consumers that rely on the services.

"The signalling is clear, there's a suggestion that Google could be treated as a utility," said Pablo Ibanez Colomo, associate professor of law at the London School of Economics. "If Google is an essential facility then all of the other obligations will follow. Access is essential and Google could be regulated like a telecoms operator."

Alphabet's Google and Facebook representatives didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

Vestager said she wanted to start a debate and that the EU's current investigations into Google's mobile-phone software and advertising contracts did not question whether Google was essential. The legal threshold for declaring a service essential must show that it was prohibitively costly to establish and necessary to other companies for them to compete.

An EU deep dive into the limits of antitrust in the technology industry comes as Germany's cartel office examines whether Facebook abuses a monopoly position by imposing unfair privacy terms on users. The EU's competition investigators have been more reluctant to look at privacy issues but are increasingly interested in looking at how companies plan to use data from a takeover target.

Vestager said regulators had "an open mind" on a probe of Apple's takeover of music-recognition app Shazam. They want "to understand in detail if linking up those databases might make it harder for anyone to compete".

- Bloomberg