EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

Prague, Czechia

To ensure the effectiveness of the competition regime, agencies should still consider the implications of actions on the full spectrum of consumers. The EC and the Member States responded to the wave of problems related to the sharp rise in the influence of digital giants (including a sprawling pandemic COVID – 19 that tied consumers even more to online tools) in two ways. Both DG Comp and national competition authorities gradually opened investigations against possibly anticompetitive practices of all the GAFAs and at the same time they began to quickly prepare ex-ante legislation that would tackle main problems in the digital sector. Concerning competition investigations, this paper particularly focuses on 2021 EUGeneral Court’s ruling in the Google Shopping case. The General Court upheld the European Commission’s 2017 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. Despite this victory, critics have long argued that experience in recent years has shown that EU competition law alone is not able to effectively address many of the challenges that arise in digital markets, mainly due to the characteristics of these markets and the time needed to investigate them. Therefore, regulation that can prevent problems that arise before harming consumers should become essential for competition and enforcement of consumer law. For these reasons, hard work on new ex-ante regulation instruments has started at the level of the EC. As to new EC’s regulation approach, within less than half a year, the EC published four proposals that will shape the digital market in the EU for the years to come – the Digital Governance Act (DGA), the Digital Market Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act (DSA) and he Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). Two further initiatives have been announced – a Data Act and an AI Liability Act. This paper analyzed only two legislative proposals in more detail that were published in December 2020 – the DMA proposal and the DSA proposal. During the year 2021, due to many hundreds of comments from the Members of the European Parliament (MEP), both proposals underwent huge changes, and to a certain extent, their original character and purpose changed to a certain extent. Still, the DMA, together with the DSA, are essential to ensure that the digital world works for the benefit of digital end consumers and to prevent the behaviour of strong platforms that harm European consumers and citizens. The DMA and DSA should lead to more predictable markets for new entrants, which should lead to a greater choice of service providers for consumers.

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