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Abuse of platform power: Leveraging conduct in digital markets under EU competition law and beyond KU Leuven
Online platforms play an increasingly important role in today's economy by serving as intermediaries between consumers and suppliers. App stores, for example, connect consumers with app developers. As platforms integrate vertically, e.g. by producing and distributing their own apps, they may have an incentive to exclude the competing products of independent suppliers. Given their crucial intermediary, they often have the ability to do so. In the ...
Competition Law in the Digitized Music Industry: The Winners Take it All—but Should They? KU Leuven
The last two decades have seen the music industry crash and emerge from the ashes, more digitized but also more consolidated. New players, in particular music streaming services, have joined, but they complement rather than challenge traditional players such as record labels. Moreover, they are equally concentrated. Artists may therefore be confronted with counterparties with significant buyer power, which can be abused. In this article, we ...
Epic v Apple: Antitrust’s Latest Big Tech Battle Royale KU Leuven
This article introduces the source of the dispute between Epic and Apple (the Apple ‘tax’), examines its broader context (the gaming industry), describes the first battle in this larger war, and assesses its importance for EU competition law.
Abuse of Dominance in the Platform Economy: A Case Study of App Stores KU Leuven
App stores constitute a quintessential multisided platform market, where a few players (Apple and Google) facilitate transactions between third-party suppliers (app developers) and consumers in exchange for a commission fee. Complicating matters, these app stores are embedded in intricate mobile ecosystems with varying degrees of “openness” to third parties. Increasingly, these third parties are complaining about allegedly anticompetitive ...
Corona and EU Economic Law: Competition and Free Movement in Times of Crisis KU Leuven
The outbreak of the coronavirus—and the responses of governments and businesses to combat the medical and economic crisis it entails—raise a number of urgent questions, many of which concern European economic law, i.e. the competition rules and free movement provisions. Can businesses cooperate to guarantee the supply of essential items or a vaccine notwithstanding the cartel prohibition of Article 101 TFEU? Is the excessive price doctrine of ...
The Uber-Grab Merger and the Potentially Anti-Competitive Consequences of the Battle for Ride-Hailing Dominance KU Leuven
On March 26th 2018, news broke that the global ride-hailing giant Uber agreed to sell its Southeast Asian operations to its local competitor Grab. Four days later, a CoRe Blog post put forward a first assessment of the potentially anti-competitive consequences of the merger as well as the related phenomenon of common ownership in the ride-hailing sector. Since the publication of the post, the Uber-Grab merger has been approved, and similar ...
Literary Theory: The Antitrust Books You Should Have Read in 2019 KU Leuven
The past year was an exceptionally good one when it comes to the publication of antitrust books. New editions of authoritative textbooks were published, including the 7th edition of Jones & Sufrin (the 9th edition of Whish & Bailey was released in 2018) . New entrants also dared challenge the incumbents: Lianos, Korah & Siciliani released their own competition law tome. Given that all of these textbooks were published with Oxford ...
Online Platforms and Pricing: Adapting Abuse of Dominance Assessments to the Economic Reality of Free Products KU Leuven
Online platforms, which are at the forefront of today's economy, are subject to intensive competition law enforcement. However, the platform business model presents challenges for the application of competition law. Most notably, they appear to offer consumers a great number of their products for free. The explanation for most of these supposedly free products is offered by two-sided market theory: consumers may not be paying, but the ‘other’ ...