'Nobody expected them to like it': DG Comp chief on battling Big Tech

 "They’re entitled not to like [the DMA] – what they are not entitled to do is not comply with it," new-in-post DG Anthony Whelan tells Euractiv 

Just days into one of the most powerful roles in the EU civil service – heading the European Commission’s competition department, its jewel in the crown – Anthony Whelan is still settling in.

Speaking in his old office in the Madou Tower – with a great view of the Berlaymont – he has stepped up from a deputy role to director general of DG Competition, at the apex of the Brussels bureaucracy.

A longtime confidant of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on digital policy, the Irish veteran, 57, now finds himself at the centre of one of Brussels’ most politically charged battlegrounds: regulating Silicon Valley while navigating increasingly strained transatlantic relations. (...)