Introduction Last week, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar delivered his Opinion in case C-253/23, a preliminary reference that stems from a form of collective private enforcement of competition law in Germany called the ‘assignment model’. This type of litigation is based on the fiduciary assignment of claims from a high number of persons or companies who…
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…
Ever since its introduction in 2021, Section 19a of the German Act against Restraints of Competition (Gesetz gegen Wettbewerbsbeschränkungen or “GWB”) has attracted attention, not only in Germany, but also around the globe. Through this provision, the national legislator strengthened the regulatory framework against potentially anti-competitive practices by specific market players, namely “undertakings of paramount…
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) introduced an innovative framework aimed at promoting contestability and fairness in digital markets. In addition to imposing a multitude of substantial obligations on gatekeepers, the DMA incorporates a sophisticated and multi-faceted enforcement system. The European Commission assumes the primary role as the enforcer of the DMA, while the Member States…
Is competition law fit for purpose? Do we need better tools to make markets fair? How far should government go to ‘fix’ market structures? It’s impossible to attend an antitrust conference these days without discussing these questions under the umbrella of competition & industrial policy. From decades of broad consensus championing competitive neutrality and ‘letting…
At the end of 2023, the Bulgarian Commission for Protection of Competition (“CPC”) issued a key decision related to an abuse of dominance case in the pharmaceutical sector. The decision, which is expected to have a significant impact on the parallel export of pharmaceuticals, provides a clue to the CPC’s approach when parallel export concerns…
Overshadowed by the outsize attention surrounding the AI Act Trilogue, the EU passed in late November another regulatory instrument with transformative potential for the digital economy: the Regulation on harmonised rules on fair access to and use of data (Data Act). Admittedly, the Data Act is not as groundbreaking as the AI Act. Far from…
The World’s first hard-law horizontal legislation on artificial intelligence is currently nearing political agreement between the European Union’s (EU) three legislative branches, the European Parliament (EP), the Council of the European Union (the Council) and the European Commission (EC). Inter-institutional negotiations (or with their technical name, trilogues) continue, and there is an incredible amount of…
On September 25th the Lisbon Court of Appeal (TRL) upheld the essence of a 2022 ruling by the Portuguese Competition Court, which in turn had already upheld the 2019 decision of the Portuguese Competition Authority (PCAC) in the EDP case, condemning it to a fine of €40 million – the largest fine ever imposed in…
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…
