EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

Prague, Czechia

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

In July 2020, the EC launched the sector inquiry in the field of Consumer Internet of Things with preliminary findings published in 2021 (European Commission [online], 2021). In November 2020, the EC sent the Statement of Objections to Amazon in case of abuse of dominance for abusing non-public independent seller data opened an investigation for a possible abuse of dominance in the field of e-commerce (European Commission Amazon [online], 2020). In April 2021, the EC sent the Statement of Objections to Apple in case of a potential abuse of dominance of Apple music streaming app store practices (European Commission Apple [online], 2021). In June 2021, the EC opened an investigation against Facebook for abuse of dominance in the context of misuse of data received from external advertisers (European Commission Facebook [online], 2021) and also in 2021 against Google for a potential abuse of dominance in the online advertising technology sector (European Commission Google [online], 2021). In September 2021, EU General Court hearing took place on Google for imposing illegal restrictions on Android device manufacturers and mobile network operators to cement its dominant position in general internet search, following the 2018 EC decision (European Commission Google [online], 2018). Finally, November 2021 can be celebrated as the EC’s so far greatest success in the fight against the GAFAs thanks to the EU General Court ruling in the 2017 Google Shopping case (European Commission Google [online], 2017). The General Court fully upheld the EC’s decision that Google broke EU antitrust rules by abusing its market dominance as a search engine by unfairly promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors (General Court, 2021). The General court finds that, by favoring its own comparison-shopping service on its general results pages through more favorable display and positioning, while relegating the results from competing comparison services in those pages by means of ranking algorithms, Google departed from competition on the merits, namely: (i) The importance of the traffic generated by Google’s general search engine for comparison shopping services; (ii) The behavior of users, who typically concentrate on the first few results; and (iii)The large proportion of diverted traffic in the traffic of comparison shopping services and the fact that it cannot be effectively replaced, the practice at issue was liable to lead to a weakening of competition on the market. The General Court also notes that, given the universal vocation of Google’s general search engine, which is designed to index results

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