What's Missing in the ‘Agentic’ Story

 M. Nottingham, here. 

Google, Agcom takes AI search to the EU Commission

 Il Sole24Ore, here,

Gericht stoppt Untersuchung des Kraftstoffgroßhandels

 Bundeskartellamt, hier. 

[Das Amt hat zur Klärung der aufgeworfenen Grundsatzfragen Rechtsmittel beim Bundesgerichtshof eingelegt]

Company	Nationality / seat	Ownership
Argus Media	UK / London	Private; employee shareholders, Adrian Binks, General Atlantic (US-based growth equity firm)
S&P Global	US / New York	Publicly traded US company; institutional shareholders

AI Hype and the Capture of EU AI Regulation

 H. Ruschemeier, here. 

Digital Markets Act: MEPs want stronger enforcement amid external pushback

 EP. here. 

Draft Merger Guidelines: 98 pages, seriously?

 EC, or just (?) the Commission services: unclear, here. 

Central question to me: do the draft Merger Guidelines go beyond innovation incentives and genuinely recognise competition as a process of decentralised experimentation, learning and discovery, in which firm heterogeneity and diverse innovation paths have independent competitive value🤔? 

I'm so adverse to the term "innovation shield" that I won't be able to teach it as such, I'm afraid - I'll need to come up with another name. A bit of sanity, though: "this thing" doesn't apply to the acquisition of a start-up with an R&D project if the acquirer is a gatekeeper.

 

 

 

19a GWB : Amazon Beschluss

 Bundeskartellamt, hier (386 Seiten).

Dégafamiser : on a un plan

 Science4all, ici. 

Bravo! 

That speck in someone else’s eye

 

 

"well-placed sources have told News Diggers! that the Summit has actually been cancelled because the programme involves Taiwanese delegates who would potentially speak against China at a venue donated by the Chinese government," here.

A Counterproposal to Google's Approach to Anonymizing Search Data

 DuckDuckGo, here. 

Trilog-Verhandlungen über gelockerte KI-Regeln gescheitert

 Netzpolitik.org, hier. 

Please Do Not Call It a Watering Down of EU Merger Control

The Commission has spent the past week preparing the ground: the revision of the EU Merger Guidelines, we are told, is not about lowering the bar, nor about approving every deal without serious scrutiny.

Yet the mood among practitioners seems different. What emerged yesterday at the AGCM Conference was a clear expectation of weaker enforcement. The reaction from some national competition authorities was correspondingly concerned. 

That said, I have argued since time immemorial for a more dynamic approach to merger control (and to everything else - this goes back to my *German* PhD in economics). Static analysis is insufficient where future rivalry, discovery, potential competition, data, ecosystems, etc. matter more than immediate price effects. 

So I remain curious to see what the draft says on innovation. If the revised Guidelines make innovation analysis more serious, operational and evidence-based, that would be welcome. If, instead, “innovation” becomes the new respectable language for approving concentration in the name of scale, the revision will likely cause problems rather than solving them. 

AI, Competition and Competitiveness

 German Competition & AI Commission, here (in German hier).