EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

Prague, Czechia

[online], 2021). In 2019, Google was fined €1.49 billion for “abusive practices in online advertising” in yet another investigation led by the Commission in this particular case due to the anticompetitive conduct on the market for online search advertising (European Commission [online], 2019a). As of 22 June 2021, the Commission has begun its most recent investigation against Google concerning the anticompetitive conduct of Google in the online advertising market under both the Article 101 and 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (European Commission [online], 2021). All the abovementioned cases are connected by their affiliation to the ad tech market and as such, necessarily have similar features. Each of the investigations mentioned above are premised on a breach of (either exclusively or along with another Article of Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union) Article 102 of the Treaty on the Function of the European Union, which is ultimately the factual core of the regulation of the competition within the European Union. This paper aims to answer the question, whether the submitted proposal of DMA is capable of efficient ex ante regulation of big tech companies, with special focus to Google. As for the methodology, the authors analyze the aforementioned investigations and if available, conclusions of such investigations and try to answer the question, whether the challenged behavior can be regulated in the more casuistic manner contained in the DMA and partially detached from the general anticompetitive (and fairly abstract and not exhaustive (Daly, 2017, p. 189) Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. 3.1 General Search In 2010, the Commission responded to the request of many search services providers and opened an official in-depth investigation of possible anticompetitive conduct by Google. This conduct consisted in Google prioritizing their own shopping search results on the top of the general search and indexing the websites of other shopping search services (comparison search services) on the lower position, even on further pages of the search results, in a way that this could harm such competition (European Commission [online], 2010). It is important to note that the investigation was concerning primarily Google’s horizontal search services (Ellia, 2017, p. 470) (Horizontal search services are search service that provides answers (indexes relevant websites) on more general rather than specific queries. Vertical search services, on the other hand, are focused on more specific queries and provide more detailed information regarding the goods and services in the indexation results itself (e.g., price comparison, where to buy, costumer reviews etc.) – Google Search – and therefore the relevant 3.;Google and anticompetitive investigations

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