Today we are closing another great year at the Kluwer Competition Law Blog! We want to thank you all for your contributions, discussions and overall curiosity for competition law and policy. We are excited for 2025 and all the developments we can follow together.   In 2024, the most read blogposts posted in 2024 were:…

A new kid may join the digital tech regulation block. On 2 December, the Australian Treasure proposed a new digital competition regime addressing digital market power. The policy of the Australian legislator and enforcer builds on its long-term digital strategy, triggered in 2017. For more than seven years now, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission…

The Digital Markets Act (DMA)’s provisions started to apply on 2 May 2023. Since then, undertakings have been forced to check whether they met the quantitative thresholds. If that was the case, the DMA compelled them to notify their potential gatekeeper status to the European Commission. The first wave of designation decisions relating to six gatekeepers…

Deployment of systems of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become mainstream and popular with small and large economic operators. One of the most raging developments includes services relying on natural language processing (NLP) taking the form of chatbots. In a previous blog post, I explored the opportunities the Digital Markets Act (DMA) provides the regulator to…

To commemorate the Digital Markets Act’s initial designation decisions, in September the European Commission issued its first two decisions opening specification proceedings on Apple’s technical implementation of Article 6(7) DMA (see case DMA.100203 and case DMA.100204). These are the first specification proceedings triggered by the European Commission as stemming from its capacity to do so…

Approaching the summer vacation, the end of July was deemed extremely eventful for NCA enforcement actions. On 18 July, the Italian Competition Authority (ICA or AGCM) triggered a sanctioning proceeding against Google with respect to the submission to users of a request for consent to the linking of the services they offer. A few days…

The General Court dismissed ByteDance’s action seeking the annulment of the European Commission’s designation decision of its TikTok service. The Extended Composition of the Eighth Chamber of the General Court (GC) confirmed ByteDance’s status as a gatekeeper. The ruling is the first of its kind: the first ruling to address head on the Digital Markets…

Japan is now the fourth region in the World to have adopted complementary rules to its competition law regime to capture the power of Big Tech. Following Germany’s, the UK’s and the European Union’s steps, Japan in June the Act on Promotion of Competition for Specified Smartphone Software (for short, the Smartphone Software Competition Promotion…

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) was initially designed according to a centralised system of enforcement. At least, that was the configuration the European Commission presented within its first draft of the regulation. During the legislative process, the DMA’s enforcement system slightly pivoted to a quasi-centralised system of enforcement. National competition authorities (NCAs) of the Member…

Europe has been a frontrunner in the regulation of artificial intelligence on a global scale. The adoption of the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) defines one – despite important – step of the puzzle of European policy on AI. After the adoption of the Council last week, such an ambitious approach is still surrounded by…