Next 16 November 2023, the deadline for the designated gatekeepers on the 5th of September 2023 to appeal the Commission’s decisions will come to an end (for a review of the decisions, see here). Up until this moment, reporting has only documented that Apple would be considering challenging the Commission’s decisions and is prone to…

On September 27, 2023, the European General Court (GC or the Court), for the first time, issued a decision related to the new set of rules for the digital space introduced by the Digital Services Act (DSA) in Case Amazon v Commission, T-367/23 R. The Court granted Amazon interim measures concerning the application of the…

Introduction On September 26th, the European Commission prohibited the acquisition of the online flight booking service eTraveli by Booking Holdings, the leading provider of online hotel bookings in the European Economic Area (EEA). The Commission argues that the acquisition would have strengthened Booking’s dominant position in the market for online hotel bookings by enabling it…

On 9 October 2023, the European Commission (EC) issued four templates on its official website pertaining to the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Each of them deals with a different provision enshrined in the regulatory framework. First of all, the European Commission published its updated Template for Reporting pursuant to Article 11 of the DMA following…

On 5 October 2023, the German competition authority adopted its first tangible evidence of enforcement surrounding its new competition rules (Section 19a GWB) directed at undertakings with paramount significance for competition across markets on its case against Google for its data processing terms (see the Bundeskartellamt’s decision designating Alphabet here and a previous comment on…

The data economy is now thriving. A considerable corporate, entrepreneurial and research effort is aimed to enable a healthy trading of such an important asset, and hence contribute to de-siloing data and unlocking the combinatorial economic value of data that now rest in different corporate warehouses. However, the structuring of data ecosystems is still under…

On 21 June 2023, the Bundeskartellamt, the Federal Cartel Office (FCO), sent a statement of objections to Google and published its preliminary legal assessment of Google’s practices in connection with Google Automotive Services (GAS). According to the Authority’s preliminary evaluation, Google’s practices regarding the licencing of services for infotainment systems in vehicles fulfil the requirements…

On the 31st of July, the European Commission issued for public consultation its (fourth) Template relating to the audited description of consumer profiling techniques pursuant to Article 15 of the DMA (the Template). The Template is inserted within the Commission’s wider transparency strategy to provide for a stream of implementing acts to secure the DMA’s…

On 14 July 2023, the European Commission launched its second template relating to the gatekeeper’s compliance with Article 14 of the DMA (the Template), i.e., their obligation to inform about any intended concentration involving core platform services or any other services in the digital sector or enabling the collection of data (Article 14(1) of the…

On 4 July 2023, the Court of Justice resolved the conundrum around the potential interaction between data protection regulation and competition law following the legal opera that started in 2019 with the German competition authority’s case against Facebook/Meta’s processing activities (for a summary of the case, see here). The ruling hops onto Advocate General Rantos’…