For a long time, a prevailing view was that due to the dynamic nature of competition in digital markets intervention by antitrust authorities may do more harm than good. It was assumed that Joseph Schumpeter’s “perennial gales of creative destruction” would sufficiently discipline any...

On 6 February 2019, the German Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office – “FCO”) found that Facebook abused its dominance by improperly combining user data that it collected from various sources. As a remedy, the FCO imposed far-reaching restrictions on Facebook’s processing of user data,...

Since November 2010 the European Commission has been investigating whether Google’s business practices comply with European competition law. The Commission has identified four conducts that may violate Article 102 TFEU. To bring the investigation to an end, Google has offered several...

This article outlines the legislative proposals of the European Commission and the European Parliament for an abolition of international roaming charges. Considering the current European legislative framework and the effectiveness of the proposed amendments, we conclude that neither of the...

Google has argued that, in its comparison shopping decision, the European Commission created a novel rule that a dominant company may not favour its own services. Such a rule, it is claimed, would only be justified where the company provided an ‘indispensable service' as defined in the narrow...

Despite the rise of two- or multi-sided platforms in the digital sector, there is not yet an established antitrust policy for defining relevant markets that involve such platforms. Difficulties arise in particular where services are granted for free to some users. This article explains which...

With the most recent updates of its mobile operating systems, in April 2021 Apple implemented a new global App Tracking Transparency policy. The policy obliges app developers to display an additional (Apple-designed) prompt to request permission from end users for the developer to “track”...

On February 10th, 2021 the antitrust chamber of the German Regional Court of Munich granted two summary judgments in favor of the health portal NetDoktor, banning the preferential display within Google search results pages of boxes with information exclusively drawn from a state-run health...

Gatekeepers may seek to maximise revenues by replacing any unbiased, purely relevance-based intermediation of business users with a biased, payment-based intermediation. To this end, search engines, app stores or online marketplaces may exploit an entrenched intermediation power by making the...

This paper investigates the merits of a new related right press publisher. To this end, the paper investigates the economic and technical background and outlines the potential effects of the European Commission’s current proposal for a publisher’s right. The paper comes to the conclusion...