After the rumor mill had been bubbling for weeks in advance, it became official at the end of July 2023: the European Commission announced on its website the initiation of official antitrust proceedings against the US software giant Microsoft due to possible anti-competitive behaviour in relation to Microsoft Teams. The legal background of the EU…

Factual background During the summer of 2020, news came out about a claim made by Slack against Microsoft for abusing its dominance by tying Teams to the Microsoft and Office 365 software packages. The claim at the time was that Microsoft had been forcing millions of users to install Teams and denied them the possibility…

* This entry is a re-post of the contributor’s CCM Blog post, find link here.   On 24 January 2023 the U.S. Department of Justice (‘DoJ’), joined by multiple U.S. States including California and New York, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google alleging that the “industry behemoth […] has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad…

Factual background Just before 2022 ended the Commission sent a statement of objections to Meta regarding the potential abusive behaviour of Facebook. According to the statement of objections, Facebook may be engaging in (i) abusive tying practices with regard to Facebook Marketplace as users (i.e. consumers) that log into Facebook and are automatically also offered…

The wheels of the German competition authority’s enforcement of its dedicated rules on digital markets have started to turn (on the technical and substantive aspects of Section 19a GWB, see previous posts here and here). According to the recently introduced rules, the Bundeskartellamt first formally determines that an undertaking is of paramount significance for competition…

The long-awaited Google Android decision is out (see the press release here or the full text here). The General Court has dismissed Google’s action almost in its entirety, slightly reducing the record fine from 4.343 billion euros to (still a record) 4.125 billion euros. This post gives a very first overview of the judgment and…

The antitrust watchdog of India recently in Harshita Chawla v Whatsapp and Facebook[1] held that Whatsapp’s proposed model of integrating its payments app called ‘Whatsapp Pay’ (‘WPay’) within its messaging app is not anti-competitive since it does not constitute ‘tying in’ due to lack of coercion. In reaching such a conclusion the Competition Commission of…