Wer heute ein Fahrzeug oder eine Maschine reparieren will, braucht Zugriff auf Daten und Schnittstellen. Für viele Handwerksunternehmen wird 'Zugang' zur Schlüsselfrage der digitalen Wirtschaft. In dieser Studie wird herausgearbeitet, welche Regeln derzeit dafür gelten. Dabei zeigt sich: Es...

Wer erhält Zugang zu den Daten, die von smarten Geräten gesammelt werden? Im Internet of Things entbrennen an dieser Frage neue Verteilungskämpfe: Nur wer Zugang zu Daten hat, kann auch in Zukunft wirtschaftliche Leistungen erbringen. Die Europäische Union will mit dem Data Act für Klarheit...

The German Federal Supreme Court in 2016 decided a case brought by athlete Claudia Pechstein against the International Skating Union on a doping matter. The question at issue was whether the arbitration clause in the athlete’s contract for participating in the World Championships, entered into...

The German Parliament (Deutscher Bundestag) held a hearing in its Economic Committee on 27 June 2018, based on the motion "Stopping market concentration in the agricultural market - preserving biodiversity and food sovereignty". This motion takes the European Commission's conditional approval of...

This is a policy paper with comments for an improvement of the Digital Markets Act that had been proposed by the European Commission in December 2020. The paper was prepared for an information session of the IMCO Committee of the European Parliament on 19 February 2021. We propose to have a more...

The German Federal Cartel Office and the Austrian Federal Competition Authority have recently published a draft "Guidance on Transaction Value Thresholds for Mandatory Pre-merger Notification (Section 35(1a) GWB and Section 9(4) KartG)" for public consultation. Prof. Dr. Christian Kersting,...

The thresholds of merger control are one of the most important filters in competition law: If a transaction needs to be notified, the powerful tool of merger control may be applied. If not, the transaction usually goes completely unchecked. Despite this importance, merger control thresholds had...

This synopsis contains excerpts from and novel introductions to the four chapters constituting “FairEconomy. Crises, Culture, Competition and the Role of Law”, a monograph co-authored and published by the late Wolfgang Fikentscher, Philipp Hacker and Rupprecht Podszun in 2013. In honor and...

Competition authorities in Europe have taken enforcement action against the GAFA-companies Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. The “theory of harm” in such cases re-mains vague, however, and it is disputed whether the cases really contain competition law issues. The submission in this paper...