Nature, here.
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?
Trump Goes to Bat for Big Tech in Global Trade Talks
WSJ, here.
[South Korea - local DMA dropped already? Cautious to say the least. Brazil - everything you want to know about their draft DMA and "electronic payment practices" aka Fab Pix here].
[I wonder how Brazilians would react if Trump successfully undermined their highly efficient sovereign digital infrastructure for electronic payments].
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Here. Helena Malikova should be a public icon by now, says Isabella Weber in her book . I agree!
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EFF, here.
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The Verge, here . A bit of hope in Zuckerberg's creative self-destruction then!
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Arte.tv, ici . Don't get me started. When Google was allowed to buy Waze I was already well into having given up on merger control...
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The Rapporteur, here . There was clearly political pressure on the CMA, and the CMA found a way to exert pressure on Meta (talking about ...
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The Economic Populist, here.
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ArsTechnica, here .
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M. von Thun, here .








