Bricscompetition, here.
@WavesBlog
Friday, August 15, 2025
Thursday, August 14, 2025
Letter to DOJ: Break Google’s Ad Tech Monopoly and Request Restitution to News Publishers for Lost Revenue
Center for Journalism and Liberty, here.
Statement on Revocation of Biden-Harris Executive Order on Competition
DOJ Antitrust Division, here.
And so ends one of the most interesting experiments of Biden-era antitrust, that had begun delivering tangible results for the very American people whom Trump never misses a chance to screw over.Wednesday, August 13, 2025
An Indian undertaking filed an antitrust case against Google 15 y. ago and the case is still ongoing
From this interesting India ASCOLA webinar, hopefully recording available soon. Why was their DMA "frozen"?
Monday, August 11, 2025
The proposed ex-ante regime downgraded to a market study in India: Big Win for Big Tech
FE, here.
That was soon after South Korea's decision to dump its DMA too. Big Tech in Asia is likely celebrating, with Trump's support. By the way, how effective and influential are independent civil society orgs and academics in those jurisdictions?
More post-mortem (of the Draft Digital Competition Bill) next 13 August, 14.30 CET here.
Saturday, August 09, 2025
Friday, August 08, 2025
Should UK private competition enforcement be dismantled as well?
UK Gov, here.
Reminder: a Labour Government.
The Urgent Need For Revolutionizing Economic Statistics
D. Coyle, here.
["...if, in the not-too-distant future, my personal AI agent conducts affairs on my behalf with my bank’s AI bot, is that valuable economic activity? How should it be measured in any case?]
Thursday, August 07, 2025
Digital Sovereignty and resisting the tech giants w/ Cecilia Rikap
Politics Theory Other, Podcast here.
How Big Cloud becomes Bigger: Scrutinizing Google, Microsoft, and Amazon's investments
Wednesday, August 06, 2025
Europe’s tech sovereignty watch
Proton, here.
"When a company chooses an email service, it often uses the entire suite."Tuesday, August 05, 2025
How Brazil's innovative 'Pix' payment system is angering Trump and Zuckerberg
France24.com, here.
Totally disagree with the myopic economist's comment 😊
Curbing Google’s Dominance: The UK’s First Test of Its New Digital Competition Powers [Promising?]
KGI, here.
Well...Problematic to say the least is "making its next steps contingent on the decisions of a US district court."Japan: Regulator takes aim at app store - as in Europe.
Heise.de, here.
Guidelines here.
The Guidelines are essential reading. Not just from a European vantage point, and not merely as part of a deepening dialogue between the EU and Japan. It matters equally for jurisdictions already exploring DMA-like regimes, and for others now stirred into action.Ecosia, European Eco-Friendly Search Engine: Boosting Competition in Digital Area
The conversation with Ecosia’s Wolfgang Oels was recorded at the height of the Trump/EU trade frenzy, when whispers of the DMA’s untimely demise were making the rounds. But rumours (spread by whom, I wonder) they were. If anything, things are only now starting to get serious 🤠. And gatekeepers' competitors like Ecosia have an important role to play as part of the DMA enforcement machinery.
The Modern Economic Approach to Antitrust Law: Analysis and Examples
S. Salop, here.
[I don't know what modern means, here. Very much the same "more economic approach" that has been increasingly repudiated for a number of compelling reasons - not least because of it being used to shamelessly - "it's science, we teach it our Students!" - justify whatever suits who pays the IO economists providing the analysis].
Monday, August 04, 2025
Sustainability agreement in the wine sector in Occitanie: opinion published
EC, here.
[Great for next teaching semester, and for a Master student working on this topic]
Sunday, August 03, 2025
Saturday, August 02, 2025
Friday, August 01, 2025
CLOUD SERVICES MARKET INVESTIGATION: FINAL CUT
CMA, Summary of final decision here.
Full 637-page Report here.
Appendix A-W here.
This is already the new Bible on 'cloud services and competition policy.' This colossal work will feed into worldwide antitrust and DMA-like analyses and enforcement actions, both public and private, for years to come.
But, you know, the "CMA has indicated that no decision will be taken by the CMA Board on future SMS designation investigations in 2025 but that it will keep under review possible options and it anticipates that these will be considered in early 2026"...
Wednesday, July 30, 2025
Meta Sudans Redux: AGCM at the Gates
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And so we circle back to where we began: the 2014 EDPS Venn diagram - as 'updated' to include the DMA. It’s clear the Italian antitrust authority knows it’s not operating in a vacuum. It is, rather, doing what it can with the tools at its disposal, under no optimistic assumption that the practices Meta engages in, and the services it rolls out, are otherwise fully compliant with the complementarily applicable legal regimes (those on the updated diagram and, additionally and eventually - as of tomorrow - the AI Act). Already the brief encounter with Meta’s privacy policy, as recounted in the decision, must have been enough to dispel any such illusion.
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
Die [europäischen] Industrie-Goliaths müssen besser erkennen, welche Davids wirklich gute Steinschleudern entwickelt haben
R. Laguna de la Vera, hier und hier.
Nötig ist eine neue Wettbewerbsordnung: Wer externe Innovation übernimmt, muss auch klare Schranken akzeptieren, damit keine unüberwindbaren „Moats“ entstehen. Gefragt ist mehr „Market Engineering“ in der Wettbewerbspolitik – eine Aufgabe, die Kartellbehörden übernehmen sollten, wie es die CMA bei Generative AI bereits versucht hatte, bevor man ihr einen Maulkorb verpasste. Und man muss auch sagen: Es geht nicht nur darum, ob Innovation stattfindet – sondern welche Art von Innovation. In einem Rechtssystem ohne klare Grenzen zum Schutz von Rechten, sozialem Welfare, Menschenwürde ist es natürlich einfacher, etwas als „innovativ“ zu feiern, scale-up und viel Geld daran verdienen.
Artificial Intelligence and Civil Liability
A. Bartolini, here (study requested by the EP JURI Committee).
Monday, July 28, 2025
China: Action Plan on Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence
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Scenario 1 |
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Scenario 2 |
How will it unfold? Too early to call. But where does the EU fit in? One suspects the Global South would rather place its trust in Brussels’ regulatory safeguards than in Beijing’s overtures. Will Europe seize the moment, or squander it amid Trump-fuelled distractions and further dependencies?
Digital platforms and competition in Australia
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Evidence that the EuroStack debate |
Mandala Partners, here.
[Paid by Apple - and actually instructive]
Commission preliminarily finds Temu in breach of the Digital Services Act in relation to illegal products on its platform
PR, here.
Will we see more DSA and DMA action before the summer break?
The best response to US tariffs would be for the EU to eliminate its own internal barriers to trade
S. Nixon, here.
[Serious question, need to find out: why can't I get a loan to buy a flat in Rome from, let's say, a Dutch bank?]
AI Should Help Fund Creative Labor
"Plagiarize
Plagiarize
Let no one else's work evade your eyes ✅
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don't shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize”
- just to a whole new scale?
Another, complex conversation
Fueling US digital exports growth into the EU, you say?
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One gone, for now, two blissfully absent |
Peacock Tariff Consulting, here.
Saturday, July 26, 2025
Friday, July 25, 2025
Boiled by Design: Can Europe Still Save Its Digital Frog (and almost everything else)?
Now, I’d like to offer a few thoughts to set out where, in my view, the key points lie, and how we might frame them in a way that keeps this essential conversation moving in the right direction for the EU and beyond. I won’t begin with the problems, those are already well worn ground for any Wavesblog Reader who isn’t merely passing through. But if you do fall into that latter category, I’d suggest starting with the EuroStack Report itself, if you don't know it already, which came up several times during the panel discussion.
To stack or not to stack - and how?
Thursday, July 24, 2025
Digital Markets Act: Civil society calls for investigation into Alphabet’s non-compliance
Article 19 et al., here.
Activating the full DMA's potential (Episode XX, still only scratching the surface):
"Article 27
Information by third parties
1. Any third party, including business users, competitors or end-users of the core platform services listed in the designation decision pursuant to Article 3(9), as well as their representatives, may inform the national competent authority of the Member State, enforcing the rules referred to in Article 1(6), or the Commission directly, about any practice or behaviour by gatekeepers that falls within the scope of this Regulation."
But (and this is one of the issues with the DMA, not the it wasn't mentioned during the negotiations):
"2.
The...Commission shall have full discretion as regards the appropriate
measures and are under no obligation to follow-up on the information received"
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
Has Brazil Invented the Future of Money?
Martijn Snoep: Antitrust & Industrial Policy. Independence or Coordination. Champions. Latest Cases
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Tools available to make markets work |
Impressive, brave interview.
I'm perhaps a bit more positive about the long term impact of the DMA: it's going to evolve (that was the legislators' will), it creates new, important rights for end users and business users, and it is already influencing competition policy in a positive way. But it was never supposed to act in isolation (again, as foreseen by the legislators - see e.g. the HLG). Plenty of potential in many directions...
Listening to how the ACM has come to see itself as "market designer," I was reminded of this 2017 "no AI" generated image I used at a conference in Brazil (found back by chance while writing this).
PayPal taps wallets from China and India to make cross-border payments easier for 2 billion people
TechCrunch, here.
[Paypal creating a privately owned infrastructure for cross-border payments?]
Real innovation happens when companies have to compete on merit, not on who can kiss the leader’s ass most effectively
TechDirt, here.
[Invited by the OECD to speak on competition and innovation, I only wish I’d presented my research findings just as effectively]
Nerd Reich: why tech billionaires want a ‘corporate dictatorship’
Decoder, here.
[What can a humble researcher, middle-aged woman and Italian on top of that, possibly do against what is already a serious threat to our precious democracy in the name of *tech and innovation*? Nothing, I'm afraid. But I'll keep frantically blogging, also a bit outside Wavesblog's traditional core topics - since October 2007, at least until Google starts censoring us here on Blogger ;-)]
The Sound of Reduced Competition? Music, Data, and the UMG/Downtown Merger
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Not the usual Competition Commissioner's statement. Whole-of-Commission Approach? |
EC, here.
[Dutch company buying an US company, mind you. At any rate, it sounds lkve a no brainer theory of harm]
South Korea: Local DMA Bill "likely to be put on hold due to pressure from the TRUMP administration"
S. Lee (from LinkedIn), here.
"Discovered" by a researcher coming back from vacation? Don't they have civil society active in digital in South Korea?
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J. Ryan, here .
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A. Bradford, A. Chilton, and K. Linos, here .
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C. Pattison et al., here.
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FE, here. That was soon after South Korea's decision to dump its DMA too. Big Tech in Asia is likely celebrating, with Trump's sup...
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DuckDuckGo, here.
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PerkinsCoie, here.
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Bloomberg, here.
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ARD, Tagesschau hier.
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An Indian undertaking filed an antitrust case against Google 15 y. ago and the case is still ongoingFrom this interesting India ASCOLA webinar, hopefully recording available soon. Why was their DMA "frozen"?