While Trump at the G7 Meeting just said in Macron's face "I'm the boss", cheerful atmosphere in sunny Brussels.
After twenty-four hours at the European Competition Forum, the first impressions are becoming sharper. The Forum, we learned, apparently began as a chat, with the European Commission also present, on a platform which one hopes was not itself the competition problem.
A second reason was more practical: the familiar pilgrimage to Washington to talk antitrust. At some point, someone apparently asked the obvious question: why not talk antitrust in Europe, without the jet leg? From that perspective, the Forum could become something the place (.Square") where antitrust practitioners from across the world come to discuss competition law not in Washington DC, but in Brussels. Or, as Executive Vice-President Ribera put it, in “the capital of the rule of law”.
At least yesterday and this morning, and this may change this afternoon or on the third day at the latest (when I will no longer be there), the panels followed a familiar pattern: competition authorities, some academics, companies, and possibly consultants, although not always clearly identified as such. Unsurprisingly, no one in the latter categories volunteered any possible conflicts of interest.
As for substance, frankly, there was little that a regular reader of this blog would not already know rather well. Antitrust received the usual beating: proceedings take at least seven years, while regulation is expected to be broader and faster. There was considerable praise for interoperability, including under the DMA. Unsurprisingly, once AI and interoperability entered the discussion, operating systems followed immediately, with Android and Apple as the obvious reference points.There was also a brief reference to digital sovereignty, innovation & Co. coupled with the familiar suggestion that competition policy can do little in these spaces.
On this point, I disagree. It is not competition policy as such that can do little. It is this kind of competition policy (besides the mixed, ex ante DMA) that can do little. A different competition policy could matter considerably more. But we are clearly not there yet. The intellectual centre of gravity remains markedly traditional and proven ineffective if not plain wrong.
That said, traditionalism is not a certainty any more; Yesterday, for instance, we heard some openings from the current EC competition chief economist that were broader than what we have heard from another entrenched IO economist, Fiona Scott Morton, who had also been considered for the same role. In that respect, one may say, with some relief, that the appointment could have been worse.
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