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. In front of the European antitrust establishment attending the Chillin’ Competition conference last 21 November, the Commissioner heralded a return to the exploitation origins of EU competition law. Continue reading “Vestager’s razor to cut the ordo-liberal knot”
Category: Article 102
Recent cases concerning abuse of a dominant position
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. This week, we have witnessed with weary amazement Mountain View’s questing beast being struck by two new charge sheets: a supplementary statement of objections that persists restlessly in the unpalatable self-preferencing theory of harm and a brand new accusation of limiting third-party websites’ ability to display advertisements from rival online advertising intermediaries. Thus, a third limb has now been added to Vestager’s admonition barely three months after the tech colossus was made aware of her concerns over Android (see ‘Do androids dream of exclusivity?’). Continue reading “The bonfire of the vanities 3.0”
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. Almost thirty years ago, Ridley Scott brought this moral debate to the big screen in a film featuring Harrison Ford ‘retiring’ human-like ‘replicants’. Now, the Commission, as a modern antitrust blade runner, is seeking to ‘retire’ an Android which seems to have developed overambitious feelings.
As a matter of fact, this ambition of Google’s mobile app business gave Vestager a reason not to break with the tradition of giving the technological giant an April shower. One year after the charge sheet on Google Shopping (see ‘Alternativlos!’), Mountain View was hit with a brand new statement of objections focussing on Android. On this occasion, Google was preliminarily suspected of using its operating system to carry out conducts falling within the shabby boxes of tying and exclusive dealing. Continue reading “Do androids dream of exclusivity?”
Alternativlos!
‘Alternativlos!’ The deterministic slogan of the pensée unique in its English version, and proclaimed worst word of 2010 in Goethe’s language for not so different reasons, has been turned by Mathias Döpfner into the war cry of Google’s foes. Indeed, in a letter addressed to Mountain View that has gone down in history of antitrust yellow press, Axel Springer’s Chief Executive Officer came up with an apocryphal theory of harm that the eager EU trustbuster seems to have fallen for. In April 2015, Berlaymont took another shot at the tech leviathan aiming at a business that one would not consider precisely flagship: its comparison shopping service. Continue reading “Alternativlos!”