2019 was the year of large-scale scientific reports on competition policy in the digital era.In January 2020, the German government translated these preparatory works into action and published the first fully-fledged legislative proposal for reforming competition law, tellingly dubbed the...

The more content provided to Google by publishers, the more attractive the search engine becomes. However, the more content is consumed on Google, the less traffic reaches the content providers. But blocking the content for Google is not an option for content providers either. Antitrust...

In September 2018, the European Commission sent out formal requests for information to investigate allegations of an anticompetitive conduct by Amazon. The investigation relates to the interdependencies between Amazon's third-party sales platform for retailers (“Amazon Marketplace”) and...

Despite being a rather new phenomenon, the Internet of Things is already powering a fast-growing market of “smart” objects that are able to collect and assess huge amounts of data. This article outlines which regulatory challenges policy-makers have to overcome to ensure a sufficient...

With the most recent updates of its mobile operating systems, in April 2021 Apple implemented a new global App Tracking Transparency policy. The policy obliges app developers to display an additional (Apple-designed) prompt to request permission from end users for the developer to “track”...

On February 10th, 2021 the antitrust chamber of the German Regional Court of Munich granted two summary judgments in favor of the health portal NetDoktor, banning the preferential display within Google search results pages of boxes with information exclusively drawn from a state-run health...

A recently published study by the author addressed the remedies imposed in the European Commission’s (the “Commission”) Google Search (Shopping) antitrust decision of 2017. The study ‘Google’s (Non-) Compliance with the EU Shopping Decision,’ considered the measures that Google...

Gatekeepers may seek to maximise revenues by replacing any unbiased, purely relevance-based intermediation of business users with a biased, payment-based intermediation. To this end, search engines, app stores or online marketplaces may exploit an entrenched intermediation power by making the...

This paper investigates the merits of a new related right press publisher. To this end, the paper investigates the economic and technical background and outlines the potential effects of the European Commission’s current proposal for a publisher’s right. The paper comes to the conclusion...

On 27 July 2017, the European Commission adopted a decision finding that, between January 2008 and 27 July 2017, Google infringed Article 102 TFEU by positioning and displaying more favorably, its own comparison shopping service (compared to competing comparison shopping services) in the general...