The Spanish competition authority on the Commission’s proposed New Competition Tool and Digital Service Act. A few thoughts
The CNMC’s position paper seems to take a balanced stance in that it emphasizes the risks of across-the-board enforcement in rapidly evolving settings as digital markets where type I errors feature a particularly large potential for nipping in the bud business models that could grow very beneficial for competition and consumers.
Are smart contracts to outsmart competition rules?
Digital economy has been posing a massive challenge for competition enforcers, who are often led to stretch analogue-world rules in an attempt to capture brand new business dimensions.
Coordination and information exchanges in financial markets. What comes first the chicken or the egg?
Intervention by competition authorities in financial markets is a complex and delicate task, given that financial service providers act not only as competitors but also as counterparties, intermediaries, and cooperation partners.
The Android of dawn
Last July the Commission struck back on Google with record fines, just like in summer 2017. On this occasion, Mountain View’s famous replicant was targeted by Berlaymont’s blade runner to cut short excessive optimism about Intel’s new dawn[1].
Has the Spanish Competition Authority found a way out of project finance antitrust maze?
Project finance has fallen under the spotlight of competition authorities as traditional antitrust concerns over competitors’ joining forces have met with increasing worries about financial customers suffering from information asymmetries.
Google Search. Shopping for an appropriate abuse standard
Now that Google and the Commission are at daggers drawn in Luxembourg over the 27 June decision in Google Search,[1] it seems like high time to make our educated guesses about how the recently disclosed arguments in the tech giant’s September appeal[2] will come into play.
Vestager’s razor to cut the ordo-liberal knot
To turn the page on more than forty years of quarrel over whether antitrust is about protecting the competitive process without prejudging its result or about ensuring that markets have a competitive structure (thereby tipping the balance towards a particular market outcome), Commissioner Vestager has finally applied Ockham’s law of parsimony.
Has the Commission let slip the watchdogs of war?
E-commerce is no longer the last frontier of antitrust law, but rather the battlefield of a war which is already being fought on many fronts.
The bonfire of the vanities 3.0
Google doesn’t seem to have expiated its sins as Berlaymont’s crusade is about to become a Seven Years’ War.
Do androids dream of exclusivity?
Almost fifty years ago, Philip K. Dick wondered whether androids dreamt of electric sheep as a way of reflecting on robots’ ability to develop feelings and on humankind’s entitlement to doing away with machines showing this dangerous anomaly.