Ms Margrethe Vestager:

It is interesting and so regrettable a number of successful, now US, businesses have their origins within the European Union. You find so many clever, entrepreneurial people within our Union. What we have seen so far is that many of them will leave for the US for skilled employees and capital to come on board. We have been trying to create better capital conditions by creating the capital union, because European companies often go to the bank and create more debts if they need capital on board, whereas in the US it is much more the custom that you go to the market and sell 5% or 10% of your business and not only do you get capital on board, you get new competences on board. It is definitely not a given that the innovator or initial entrepreneur who has created a great product also holds the competences to scale that business. We also want to create a different sort of capital market dynamic in Europe.

The second thing, and here there is a sense of urgency, is to make sure the industrial potential of Europe is being used in full because everything digitalises: energy, mobility, health and agriculture. Those ought to be the triggering events for European industry to dominate the next big chapter of digitalisation. That takes an open marketplace in order that they can get to their customers. It takes capital, a capital market that is willing to take risks and, of course, a Single Market approach in order that solutions can be scaled up because a full Single Market is available. I am quite enthusiastic about this but it will take considerable effort for us to use this industrial culture and potential to its full.

On the ongoing cases, actually we have quite a few tax cases. The Apple tax case is under appeal and I cannot comment on that, but what was interesting for me to see is that some of the things we have been looking at before are coming back. We have to look at the same behaviour, only in slightly different markets. If it is a different market, there is a different dynamic, but the fundamental behaviour is very much the same. One of the things that really underpins the Digital Markets Act is that the things we have seen before should be straightforwardly prohibited in order that we do not have to spend the resources to redo investigations we have done before, with the risk of smaller businesses being squeezed out of the market in the meantime.

On the question of the digital wallet, our ambition is that it should work like a passport. You have a national passport but it is also a European passport. It is the same idea. You have a national e-identity and it should work all over Europe as well. If you can use your own identity to log in to different services, you can much better control what data you deliver or what trace you track after yourself.

The second beneficial thing is that you can create trust. Other people will know that if you choose to identify yourself, it is really you. That is one of the things which is really lacking online. I appreciate that you can be there anonymously, but I also appreciate that I know who I am dealing with. That can make the Internet a much more trusted place, if we get this to work. Having a wallet in which you can also stash your birth certificate, educational certificates and all of this can make your life much easier in the administrative procedures you have to go through in life.