How many Champions do we need?

 At the Conference of the Italian Competition Authority (Autorità Antitrust) - I've been posting some comments on Bluesky like in the good all times.

A few observations from today’s discussion on competition policy, innovation, and European champions.
The starting point was familiar: resources, innovation, and the rule of law as ingredients for growth. The Italian Competition Authority was particularly proud of its broad toolkit and of the results achieved.
Quantum computing was described as a nascent market in which no dominant position has yet been established. This immediately raises the obvious question: do we really need to wait for dominance before acting, or should competition policy also preserve the conditions under which entrenched dominance may not emerge in the first place?

The Digital Markets Act was mentioned as an innovative and brave instrument. Yet the debate often seemed to drift back towards competition among giants, as if innovation were mainly what large incumbents produce when forced to compete with one another. That is not, in my view, the core intuition of the DMA. The DMA is also/especially about enabling contestability from the margins.

The discussion on European champions was also interesting. Merger control was not identified as the central obstacle to the emergence of stronger European firms. The more plausible explanation lies elsewhere: fragmented national policies, regulatory barriers, capital markets, procurement, industrial strategy, and Member State choices. In that sense, the debate on relaxing merger control may be labelled as a convenient distraction from harder policy questions. 

But the draft merger guidelines that will be published tomorrow according to some of the well informed Panelists *will* mean a relaxation of merger control. Luckily, Article 102 is the Ferrari of competition law, no need to worry...

The example of high-speed rail in Italy is useful here. Competition between Trenitalia and Italo has produced high quality transportation and competitive prices. Today it was announced that Italo, the second Italian national champion with Trenitalia, is preparing to enter the German market to compete with Deutsche Bahn (German consumers rejoice!). There is a lesson here for the European champions debate: champions are not necessarily created by sheltering incumbents. They may also emerge when national champions are exposed to contestability, mavericks (Italo's one!), including from other European players.
Perhaps the better question is not whether Europe needs champions. It is what kind of competitive environment and regulatory intervention (a third company is about to enter the same high-speed sector thanks to commitments, we heard) allows genuinely European firms to grow without turning “champion” into a polite synonym for protected incumbent.