Chillin'Competition

My silence on the past few days has to do with several open fronts thanks to the Commission’s bad habits of summertime desk cleaning, but also to my bad habits of devoting  non-work time to conferences and talks (my only consolation is that Pablo has recently been by far the most active speaker in Chillin’ Competition’s flying circus).

-Some of you have asked for the presentation I used at the VUB’s very interesting debate on big data and competition law; here it is:

Competition-big-data_lamadrid 23 June

You know my views from quite a few previous posts (all links appear at the end of the ppp). The main addition this time was to discuss the joint French-German report issued last May which essentially makes general conjectures about how standard theries of harm could apply to big data (like they apply to any other asset) if the right facts were to arise in a given case. In sum, nothing new under the sun.

The change of attitude on the part of competition authorities is nevertheless remarkable. When I spoke at the EDPS closed-door workshop at the European Parliament in one of the first discussions on this matter my views were perhaps a bit anti-climatic for an audience pre-disposed to use competition law to tackle non-competition issues. But I did -logically- have the support of the only authority in the room, DG Comp. Now, however, we see not only the German Facebook case and the French-German report giving further visibility to a non-issue, but I also hear that some within DG Comp are pushing to do more on this front. That’s disconcerting.

-None of you have asked for the presentations I have used the past two Fridays at the College of Europe Summer Courses (where for the 4th year in a row I’ve lectured on Antitrust Procedure and Article 106). Lack of interest has never precluded me from posting stuff here, but since the two presentations are in Mandarin I’ll spare you the pain…