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There is a growing trend for high-status original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as premium electronics manufacturers and premium carmakers to create and capture value through digital extensions of their products. However, these incumbents face disruptive threats from platforms offering substitutes for these digital extensions. The literature suggests that coopetition—the interplay of cooperation and competition—is a viable strategic response to this threat. However, we have a limited understanding of how high-status OEMs coopete with platforms to maintain their digital extensions' edge over time. We address this gap through a longitudinal case study of InnoCar, a premium European carmaker whose digital extensions—car-specific digital services that enhance the driving experience, such as real-time navigation and infotainment—were challenged by Google and Apple. In response, InnoCar pursued what we call the slipstream strategy, which consists of two phases with varying intensities of cooperation and competition. A high-status OEM first increases its cooperation with platforms at the expense of competition in order to establish shared demand-related complementary assets. Second, it focuses on competing with platforms on the quality of its digital extensions while keeping cooperation to a minimum. We develop a conceptual framework that specifies the slipstream strategy and provide boundary conditions for its application. Our paper contributes to research on coopetition with platforms.

Research on platform owners’ entry into complementary markets points in divergent directions. One strand of the literature reports a squeeze on post-entry complementor profits due to increased competition, while another observes positive effects as increased customer attention and innovation benefit the complementary market as a whole. In this research note, we seek to transcend these conflicting views by comparing the effects of the early and late timing of platform owners’ entry. We apply a difference-in-differences design to explore the drivers and effects of the timing of platform owners’ entry using data from three entries that Amazon made into its Alexa voice assistant’s complementary markets. Our findings suggest that early entry is driven by the motivation to boost the overall value creation of the complementary market, whereas late entry is driven by the motivation to capture value already created in a key complementary market. Importantly, our findings suggest that early entry, in contrast to late entry, creates substantial consumer attention that benefits complementors offering specialized functionality. In addition, the findings also suggest that complementors with more experience are more likely to benefit from the increased consumer attention. We contribute to platform research by showing that the timing of the platform owner’s entry matters in a way that can potentially reconcile conflicting findings regarding the consequences of platform owners’ entry into complementary markets.

There has been an explosion in uses of educational technology (EdTech) to support schools’ teaching, learning, assessment and administration. This article asks whether UK EdTech and data protection policies protect children's rights at school. It adopts a children's rights framework to explore how EdTech impacts children's rights to education, privacy and freedom from economic exploitation, taking Google Classroom as a case study. The research methods integrate legal research, interviews with UK data protection experts and education professionals working at various levels from national to local, and a socio-technical investigation of the flow of children's data through Google Classroom. The findings show that Google Classroom undermines children's privacy and data protection, potentially infringing children's other rights. However, they also show that regulation has impacted on Google's policy and practice. Specifically, we trace how various governments’ deployment of a range of legal arguments has enabled them to regulate Google's relationship with schools to improve its treatment of children's data. Although the UK government has not brought such actions, the data flow investigation shows that Google has also improved its protection of children's data in UK schools as a result of these international actions. Nonetheless, multiple problems remain, due both to Google's non-compliance with data protection regulations and schools’ practices of using Google Classroom. We conclude with a blueprint for the rights-respecting treatment of children's education data that identifies needed actions for the UK Department for Education, data protection authority, and industry, to mitigate against harmful practices and better support schools.

In recent years, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have become three of the dominant developers of AI infrastructures and services. The increasing economic and political power of these companies over the data, computing infrastructures, and AI expertise that play a central role in the development of contemporary AI technologies has led to major concerns among academic researchers, critical commentators, and policymakers addressing their market and monopoly power. Picking up on such macro-level political-economic analyses, this paper more specifically investigates the micro-material ways infrastructural power in AI is operated through the respective cloud AI infrastructures and services developed by their cloud platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Through an empirical analysis of their evolutionary trajectories in the context of AI between January 2017 and April 2021, this paper argues that these cloud platforms attempt to exercise infrastructural power in three significant ways: through vertical integration, their complementary innovation, and the power of abstraction. Each dynamic is strategically mobilised to strengthen these platforms’ dominant position at the forefront of AI development and implementation. This complicates the critical evaluation and regulation of AI technologies by public authorities. At the same time, these forms of infrastructural power in the cloud provide Amazon, Microsoft, and Google with leverage to set the conditions of possibility for future AI production and deployment.

Is Google Search a monopoly with gatekeeping power? Reg-ulators from the US, UK, and Europe have argued that it isbased on the assumption that Google Search dominates themarket for horizontal (a.k.a. “general”) web search. Googledisputes this, claiming that competition extends to all verti-cal (a.k.a. “specialized”) search engines, and that under thismarket definition it does not have monopoly power.In this study we present the first analysis of Google Search’smarket share under vertical segmentation of online search.We leverage observational trace data collected from a panelof US residents that includes their web browsing history andcopies of the Google Search Engine Result Pages they wereshown. We observe that participants’ search sessions begin atGoogle greater than 50% of the time in 24 out of 30 verticalmarket segments (which comprise almost all of our partic-ipants’ searches). Our results inform the consequential andongoing debates about the market power of Google Searchand the conceptualization of online markets in general

In this paper, we discuss the role competition law can play in safeguarding the democratic ideal. We do so against the background of the tech-driven decline of democracy that can be witnessed around the globe.

Democratic governance is anchored in the principle that power is vested in the people, and that people can choose wisely. Citizens must benefit from an undistorted flow of relevant information that allows them to exercise their autonomous choices as citizens and voters. Despite the many benefits that the digital era has brought to users, it has also opened the door to increased manipulation, misinformation, and distortions in the marketplace of ideas. Can competition law be part of the solution to these issues?

We begin our discussion with an illustration of the way in which the digital economy contributes to distortions in the marketplace of ideas. We look at the ways in which digital platforms have created power imbalances that distort competition, autonomy, and the market for ideas, and how the value chains underlying their business models easily lead to this outcome.

We then reflect on the positioning of the democratic ideal in relation to antitrust enforcement, noting two opposing endpoints of integration: the ‘competition dynamic’ approach that views democracy as a valuable incidental outcome of effective competition enforcement, and the ‘integrated’ approach, which argues for democracy to form an internal substantive benchmark of competition assessments. In between these two endpoints, we position a third model to which we refer as the ‘external benchmark’ approach to democratic antitrust. That approach imports relevant external benchmarks which could be used to assess harm to democracy, without directly changing the traditional intervention benchmarks. It is anchored in developments of European case law, and in particular the recent Court of Justice judgment in Meta Platforms v Bundeskartellamt (2023). We elaborate on this model, its application and usefulness.

With the year 2024 being an important election year throughout the world, the ‘external benchmark’ approach may offer a path through which competition law could rise to the challenge and protect the marketplace of ideas in 2024 and beyond.

To address concerns about the competitive dynamics of digital markets, the promotion of interoperability has been often pointed out as a fundamental component of policy reform agendas. In the case of mobile ecosystems, the smooth and seamless availability of interoperability features is crucial as third-party devices and apps would be otherwise unable to effectively work and participate within the ecosystems. However, access to application programming interfaces (APIs) may be restricted due to privacy, security, or technical constraints. Further, an ecosystem orchestrator may misuse its rule-setting role to pursue anticompetitive goals by restricting or degrading interoperability for third-party services and devices. The paper aims at investigating whether and how effective interoperability could be achieved through the enforcement of competition rules or whether it would require regulatory interventions, such as those envisaged in the European Digital Markets Act (DMA).

Recently, several private and political cloud initiatives emerged in Europe. This paper demonstrates how the sociotechnical imaginaries of three European cloud projects reveal a performative coupling of innovation and political ideas of control, territoriality and sovereignty. I ascertain three elements of the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (innovation, boundary making and material properties) guiding the empirical analysis. Taking technology in the making and its role in (geo)politics seriously, this paper shows how imaginaries shape and interact with current geostrategic and political developments in Europe. The analysis of Microsoft’s cloud, Bundescloud and GAIA-X reveals that rising privacy and data security issues have been integrated into cloud imaginaries that traditionally highlight progress and innovation. More specifically, state actors and cloud providers link and sometimes merge allegedly opposing technological aspects of innovation and politicised ideas of control such as digital sovereignty. This shift constitutes a move towards erecting political borders and localising IT within a global infrastructure.

On 28 September 2022, the European Commission released its long-awaited proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Liability Directive (AILD). In contrast to the high expectations on providing a harmonised liability framework for the damage caused by AI systems, the proposed AILD only proposes minimum harmonised procedural rules to facilitate evidence disclosure and alleviate the burden of proof undertaken by claimants. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the proposed AILD and points out the problems when implementing the proposed rules. This article argues that the AILD may never reach its full potential as its name indicates. The fragmentation among Member States regarding the substantive matters may preclude the AILD from moving a step further for harmonising substantial issues. While a comprehensive risk regulation (the EU AI Act) must be followed by an effective remedy mechanism, the proposed AILD will not fill this gap in the short run.

When the P2B Regulation1 became applicable on 12 July 2020, it was the first horizontal framework for the platform economy in the European Union (EU). However, the new Regulation was not met with great fanfare. Some commentators dismissed the P2B Regulation as lacking ambition and criticized that one could actually see that it had been put together rather quickly.2 The wider public hardly took any notice of the arrival of the P2B Regulation. Maybe it was just bad timing. Amid a global pandemic, digital platforms were seen as a solution rather than a problem as much of our lives went online. Since then, public opinion on tech enterprises has evolved and the EU has enacted with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) one of the world’s most ambitious regulatory frameworks for the platform economy.

However, while the DMA has been heralded as the most sweeping legislation to regulate tech since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),3 the P2B Regulation continues to struggle with visibility. The European Commission’s first preliminary review of the Regulation in September 2023 highlighted that ‘awareness among business users and online intermediation services is insufficient’.4 To some extent, this could be attributed to the overshadowing presence of the DMA and DSA. When the Commission published their proposals for the DMA and DSA in December 2020—less than 6 months after the P2B Regulation had become applicable—all political (and most scholarly) attention focused on the twin Regulations. From this perspective, the P2B Regulation could be seen as an ephemeral and insignificant precursor to the DMA and DSA, which became obsolete when the latter two regulations came into force.

Abstract: The adoption of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) has changed the regulatory landscape for the digital sector in Europe and beyond. The DMA amounts to a complete system of ex ante rules that provide for a specific clausus numerus of obligations and prohibitions and aims at fostering contestability and fairness in the area of large digital platforms. The DMA is ostensibly not competition law, since it functions ex ante and not ex post, but in reality, it is very much influenced by competition law and, therefore, is very much seen as the ex ante side of the same coin, the other side of the coin being the ex post competition rules. Like in competition law, the question of private enforcement takes a central role in the overall system of enforcement. The purpose of the present article is to shed light on the private enforcement of the DMA rules. In particular, it deals, first, with the preliminary question, i.e. that the enforcement of the DMA is not restricted to public authorities (the European Commission) but is also enforced by the courts in civil law disputes between private parties. Second, it considers the questions of available remedies in private enforcement, the applicable procedural rules and the rules on jurisdiction and conflict of laws (private international law). Finally, it centres on risks of fragmentation and the DMA mechanisms to remedy this problem.