Chillin'Competition

Some of you will recall that a while ago, in this post, I announced that I’d be speaking about the Android investigation (which I did already, as explained here) and that I would welcome any views anyone could send my way. Geoffrey Manne then sent us the post he’d publish on this topic in Truth on the Market and asked whether it’d be possible for us to republish it for it to have a greater EU audience. We did re-publish it because we thought it was topical and provocative even if it could be seen as one sided, and because it saved us from thinking about what to write for one day.

The post seems to have had more impact than expected. The piece was first subject to criticism by Trevor Soames (Microsoft’s lawyer in the case) in the course of the panel in which I participated (this, by the way, led one of my new associates to comment that he had been surprised at how people actually read what is published on this blog…). And yesterday, ICOMP also published its own equally harsh rebuttal to Manne’s post, purporting to provide information on issues that “many of the ChillinCompetition readers may not be aware” of.

Against this background, in the light of ICOMPs previous legal actions, and in order to preempt any claim that we’re dominant on a competition law blogging market (which we’re not according to revenue-based shares, we can assure you) and should hence be subject to a blogging neutrality principle, we are also linking to ICOMP’s piece and giving it a level of visibility comparable to the one we gave to Manne’s post.

We only have three additional puns comments on this story:

• We are grateful to ICOMP for sending us increased traffic and take no issue with any scraping from content published in Chillin’Competition;

• We frankly have no interest whatsoever in the who-pays-who debate (unless anyone paid us, which very unfortunately isn’t the case) and only regret that academic writing on economically relevant issues these days is suspect (with reason or not) of being paid for. Since we are rather interested in the substance of things, my co-blogger Pablo –who should be free from all suspicion- has committed to writing about some legal issues relevant to the Android investigation before the end of the week (in what seems like a déjà vu, I agreed with this proposed commitment but I may change my mind if a substantial number of you disagree…) [By the way: I’m sure that post will have more readership than his most recent one on two intricate issues such as State aid and string theory J; forgive him, he’s new to this… 🙂 ]

• ICOMP’s piece states the following: “If Manne doesn’t have a basic understanding of European competition rules, why should he be featured on the ChillingCompetition blog?”.                                                  Well, just to clarify a possible misunderstanding: it should be apparent to any usual readers that having a basic knowledge of EU Competition rules was never really a requisite for writing on this blog; we’re the living example.