{"id":1691,"date":"2019-01-22T15:44:12","date_gmt":"2019-01-22T14:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/?p=1691"},"modified":"2019-01-24T11:57:34","modified_gmt":"2019-01-24T10:57:34","slug":"conference-debriefing-6-shaping-the-future-of-competition-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/blog\/2019\/01\/22\/conference-debriefing-6-shaping-the-future-of-competition-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Conference Debriefing (6): Shaping the future of competition policy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Meet the latest conference host in the Brussels circuit \u2013 it is no one else but Commissioner Margrethe Vestager. She made her entry into that market with a bang: Presenting a Nobel prize winner and other notable and notorious figures for free. Someone obviously learned the \u201cthink big and make it free\u201d lesson from Silicon Valley\u2026 The conference about the future of competition policy was heavily overbooked, but Rupprecht Podszun was one of the 700 or so in the Charlemagne building. Here is his conference debriefing!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Name of\nConference:<\/strong> Shaping competition policy in the era of digitisation<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Location:<\/strong> The Charlemagne\nbuilding in Brussels. Huge. Airport-style-security, the difference being that\ninstead of a grumpy security guy ever-smiling Kris Dekeyser, usually Director\nfor Policy and Strategy in DG COMP, oversaw that things ran smoothly (and they\ndid).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Host:<\/strong> The Commissioner\nherself. It was the first conference during her mandate (and probably the last\none, too), but you could not tell. Someone noted that she was present all day,\nsitting in the front row, listening intently. Not something you are necessarily\nused to with high profile politicians. She also mingled with the ordinary folks\nat coffee breaks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Audience:<\/strong> Many familiar faces,\nand many more I had never seen before. For instance, I spotted Philip Lowe,\nJacques Steenbergen, Frank Montag, Isabelle da Silva, Birgit Krueger, Cristina\nCaffarra \u2013 oh, maybe you start identifying participants yourself on this photo<\/a>,\nposted by the Commissioner!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Okay, okay, I understand: It was the greatest\nshow on earth.<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

De-fi-nit-ely! And Commissioner Margrethe Vestager set the tone in her introductory remarks when she appealed to our sense of responsibility for our children: \u201cIt is not for technology to shape our future \u2013 it is for us.\u201d Digitisation changes everything, so what do we change in competition policy? I felt like being taken on a world-saving mission, somehow. But then, this is the Danish Commissioner, and she obviously is not for pathos-bathos. At the end of the day, it is her job to bring good cases and to win them at Court if necessary. And this is the fun thing about competition law: The cases echo all the discussions we have in society, from your personal Netflix addiction to your kids\u2019 use of smartphones. Yet, while this is in the air, the cases are fought on the ground over economic expertise, evidentiary standards and the right understanding of the term \u201cabuse\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Yes, that sounds like fun\u2026 may I take it that\nyou were thrilled by the discussions on data, platforms and innovation in\ndigital markets?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Sorry for getting\ncarried away, a bit. Full disclosure: I actually was on one of the panels at\nthis Conference. So, I tend to think that this was the one conference in 2019\nto attend\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Oh, you were a speaker! That\u2019s how you actually\ngot into that overbooked room!<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

And getting in was not even the biggest privilege we enjoyed, but sitting on the podium gave speakers a pretty good overview of hierarchies in DG COMP. Front middle row: The Commissioner with her special guests Jean Tirole, Nobel Prize Winner, Allianz CEO Oliver B\u00e4te, former Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao and Commissioner Mariya Gabriel from DG CONNECT. Well, most of these people were on a fly-in-fly-out mission but for job-seeking Colao (\u201cI\u2019m using my time to follow interesting stuff and important stuff\u2026\u201d). In the row behind Vestager, there were the people from her team, Wenzel Bulst, Linsey McCallum and Claes Bengtsson, and Chief Economist Tommaso Valletti. (No Chief Technologist<\/a> at DG COMP yet! Hurry up, Bundeskartellamt!) In the front row to her left you had Director General Johannes Laitenberger, Vestager\u2019s head of Cabinet Ditte Juul-Jorensen and an impressive armada of DG COMP leaders such as Carles Esteva Mosso, Cecilio Madero, Nic Banasevic, Thomas Kramler and the like. On the other side of the nave, there were Vestager\u2019s spokesman Ricardo Cardoso and the policy team with Maria Jaspers. Unfortunately, I had to give a talk, so I wasn\u2019t able to absorb the picture in full, trying to understand the intricacies of DG COMP protocol!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In your academic circles, a Nobel Prize Winner\nis probably the number one in protocol.<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Jean Tirole delivering his inspiring keynote.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

You know there is no Nobel Prize for law, and this Alfred Nobel is even reported to have hated<\/a> lawyers due to his experiences with patent lawyers\u2026 But, yes, Jean Tirole was there, and he was the star speaker of the day. He won the \u201cSveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel\u201d, as is the official name, in 2014 for his work on market power and regulation. His works on multi-sided markets are cited in every article nowadays. His appearance was inspiring. A top-notch economist can rely on his “gut feelings” instead of formula, models or robust theories. This makes it easy to follow, even for a lawyer (but hard to translate into legal argument). Take the infamous \u201ckiller acquisitions\u201d for instance. Tirole\u2019s take: Facebook\/WhatsApp and Facebook\/Instagram made me very nervous \u2013 yet I am unable to prove it. Still, he suggested to consider to shift the burden of proof in such cases. Or breaking up monopolistic providers of digital infrastructure. Tirole: There is no viable proposal on the table, yet I am not against it as such. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Honestly, a top economist considers breaking up Google?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

I never said that! He is \u201cnot against it as such\u201d. Very cautious wording! But on the open-ended intervention scale, Tirole reaches higher amplitudes than your average Valley-sponsored mainstream economist. He\u2019s French, after all. Tirole showed a table of the Top 20 Tech Firms in the world by market capitalisation, none of them being European. I guess you call that a \u201cchilling effect\u201d for all those in the room still dressed in the cuddly cloak of European industrial leadership. It took a couple of hours before MIT\u2019s John Van Reenen questioned the concept of thinking of companies as \u201cnational\u201d. Tirole took that chart to hammer home \u201c8 recommendations if one is to engage in industrial policy\u201d (again, note the cautious wording!). His suggestions were very smart and paved the way forward, in particular his idea of adaptive regulation instead of inalterable blocks of legislation as is the General Data Protection Regulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

You discussed the GDPR at a competition law\nconference?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Yes, but this was a conference on competition policy<\/em>, and it stood out by integrating perspectives that you do not get at your usual competition law conference. Take the first panel for instance: Ariel Ezrachi is of course a household name in such a conference: Co-author of the groundbreaking \u201cVirtual Competition\u201d, alerting us to the perils of data harvesting for competition. But he was joined on the panel by less frequent visitors in competition law venues, economist Alessandro Acquisti from Carnegie Mellon University and regulation theorist Karen Yeung from Birmingham University. Acquisti compellingly questioned the myths of data economics. Yeung introduced terms like democracy, human rights and rule of law, and as a benchmark for policy-making she even put forward the question: What is a good digital life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Discussing data: Hal Hodson (Economist), Ariel Ezrachi, Alessandro Acquisti, Karen Yeung, Special Adviser Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

This sounds as if the advocates of the tech\ngiants did not get much comfort at this conference.<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Hard to\ntell how they felt since they were not on the podium. The panel on platforms\nand their power gave them a particular hard time with Monique Goyens from BEUC,\nthe European organisation of consumer associations, Sandeep Vaheesan from the\nOpen Markets Institute that fired up the U.S. debate, and Fiona Scott Morton\nfrom Yale, who is a moderate, yet enforcement-friendly economist. While Goyens urged\nthe audience to see more in the consumer than just an economic unit, i.e.\nintegrating full-fledged consumer protection into competition policy, Vaheesan read\nout a pretty straight-forward attack against Amazon. Scott Morton called for\nfocussing on entry as the key issue, advocating a strong take on MFN-clauses\nand exclusionary practices. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Discussing platforms: Lewis Crofts (MLex), Fiona Scott Morton, Sandeep Vahessan, Monique Goyens and Special Adviser Jacques Cr\u00e9mer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Did the CEOs in their talk give big tech\nbusiness some breathing time?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Not even\nfor a minute. Kudos to both of them first (or their briefing teams): B\u00e4te and\nColao proved to be very knowledgeable in antitrust matters with Jennifer Baker asking\nhard questions, so their talk was interesting. Both come from industries that\nare among the most heavily regulated, insurance and telecommunications. And now\nthey see Amazon and Facebook, soaked with data, only lightly touched by\nregulation. No wonder there is some talk to do. I noted two messages in\nparticular: First, do not underestimate the competitive effects of access to\nthe customer. B\u00e4te does not want the gatekeeper to decide what the customer\nlooks at and buys. Secondly: Speed matters. (No need to mention the seven years\nof Google Shopping<\/em> at this point.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Tech journalist Jennifer Baker, Allianz CEO Oliver B\u00e4te, former Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

When I take a look at the programme it was your\npanel on innovation next, and I am sure that you will most humbly point out\nthat this was the highlight of the whole conference?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Too much speed here. Before, we heard Commissioner Mariya Gabriel, who heads DG CONNECT, talking about digitisation and the society. For most people in the room, this meant brushing up your French, since Gabriel preferred to speak in French, and the audience preferred not to display any linguistic weakness by turning to the interpretation in English or German. And what a lovely French with a rolling Bulgarian Rrrrrrrrr! I also learned that the French still come up with their very own language. Remember your \u201cordinateur\u201d (instead of \u201ccomputer\u201d) from your vocabulary book in school? Now, digitisation is \u201cnum\u00e9risation\u201d in French, while it is \u201cDigitalisierung\u201d in German, \u201cdigitaliza\u00e7\u00e3o\u201d in Portuguese or \u201cdigitalizzazione\u201d in Italian. Apart from these linguistic issues her talk served as a reminder for the framing of the conference: One \u2013 we are discussing \u201chow to shape the society of the future.\u201d Two \u2013 there is an elephant in the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The elephant in the room? I thought that was\nthe one knitted by Margrethe Vestager when not scribbling down notes!<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Could you please leave those cheap jokes for me? But true, Vestager worked on a knitted elephant<\/a> during the day. The real elephant in the room was regulation<\/a>. DG CONNECT is in charge of the platform-to-business-regulation, a legislative piece that is on its way at present. Legislators not committed to competition alone currently battle for the right approach: Do we just want transparency from platforms? Or do we take one more step? Self-preferencing<\/a> is an example. Should a platform only inform users that a product or service comes from a platform-owned company, or should there be an obligation not to favour this product in any way? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Werner Stengg, head of unit in DG CONNECT and dealing with the P2B-framework, was sitting just three metres away from me. Commissioner Gabriel and Mr Stengg seem to be very likeable, yet for competition folks their presence included the message: If you do not get your act together, we may have to jump in. If the tech giants are not tamed by antitrust law, there will be regulation, a toll that may be tougher than a false positive under competition law. For some competition lawyers the two areas are strictly separate, yet many on the podium, Tirole for instance, do not seem to share our obsession with the border between competition law and regulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In your panel, there were Mariana Mazzucato, John Van Reenen and you discussing innovation.<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Yepp. Why\ndon\u2019t you watch it? It\nis all on the web<\/a>, e.g. our panel starts at 6:50 here. Van Reenen\nspoke about rising concentration in the U.S. and Europe in all industries. Mazzucato\nis another advocate of smart government intervention. She says that governments\nshould not focus on fixing market failures only, but need to pursue a market\nshaping agenda and get their fair share out of the deal with the companies.\nWhat would Google be without the internet, what would Uber be without GPS, what\nwould the iPhone be without a touch screen? All these were publicly funded\ninventions, and so Mazzucato implies, it is fair to \u201ctax\u201d (maybe even in the\nmost literal sense, Vestager will have thought at this moment.) I cannot\nremember very much from what I said since I had to put my brain temporarily into\nthe cooling pond afterwards. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Come on, don\u2019t be shy, your slides will not be helpful anyway.<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Well, I\nencouraged DG COMP to be innovative as well, not just asking companies to be\ninnovative. And I encouraged them to risk more by doing more pioneering cases,\nbut hedging this risk with some intelligent tools. For instance, I think that\nthe institutional innovation economics approach in Dow\/Dupont is worth to be\ntested in digital industries as well. I also tried to point out that we need to\nget the price competition bias out of our toolbox, e.g. the SSNIP-test. Regarding\nthe diffusion of innovation I believe we should let the consumer decide, not\nthe gatekeeper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Discussing innovation: If you take a closer look you see Bloomberg’s Natalia Drozdiak, Mariana Mazzucato, John Van Reenen, yours truly, and Special Adviser Heike Schweitzer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lovely. So, that was it then?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Director General Johannes Laitenberger: Guess what he watched as a boy!<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

No, no, no,\nthe best is yet to come! Johannes Laitenberger had the final words, the DG, and\nwhen he started (at 8:00) I thought that he was just doing some housekeeping:\nthanking everyone, telling us that there were more than 100 contributions\nbefore the conference (published here<\/a>),\nthat there is a Student\nChallenge<\/a> and that there will be the report by the Special Advisors\nin spring, Jacques Cr\u00e9mer, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye and Heike Schweitzer.\nThese three chaired the panels by the way, giving very helpful introductions to\neach topic, before the moderators \u2013 Lewis Crofts, Hal Hodson and Natalia\nDrozdiak \u2013 took over. Laitenberger said more, however, including disclosure of\na personal secret. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Now you got me! <\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Well, first of all, his speech was interesting since he picked some issues from the day indicating where DG COMP may be heading: No reform of the treaty rules, yet action on secondary legislation, procedures and tools. Deviations from business as usual will follow: \u201cYesterday\u2019s cases and legal outcomes will not be the same as tomorrow\u2019s cases and legal outcomes.\u201d Assumptions and theories may be falsified, the burden of proof may be shifted here and there to get optimal evidence. Laitenberger also mentioned that we are not talking about technicalities that will be solved by making some calculations, but that some will require to make normative choices. For his idea of competition he alluded to Hayek\u2019s famous saying that competition is a discovery process \u2013 a mechanism where the customer ultimately decides. No mentioning of post-Chicago style consumer welfare at this point. Instead, Laitenberger distanced himself from this when saying that we are at a point just as in the early 1980s when generations of competition scholars were shaped by Robert Bork\u2019s \u201cantitrust paradox\u201d. Laitenberger: \u201cI have the feeling that right now we are at a similar moment when we come together and focalise, like today, around economics for the common good. We are at a watershed and what is shaped and what is not shaped today will again define things for generations to come.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Hadn\u2019t you promised some insights into personal\nsecrets?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Oh yes! Laitenberger looked back into his youth: \u201cWhen I was a boy my first exposure to economics was a TV series.\u201d This caught many of us off guard because you do not expect the DG to indulge in sharing personal moments from his upbringing in Portugal. But then, this was a real Laitenberger. Guess what he watched when he was a boy! \u201cFree to Choose\u201d \u2013 a TV series <\/a>where legendary Milton Friedman and his wife Rose explained the market economy. This is the stuff that DGs are made of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

What would good old Milty have made of this\nconference then?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Hard to tell. His son David styles himself as an anarcho-capitalist, and Milton himself was not known for being interventionist. So the general pro-enforcement stance of the day may not play well with the Friedmans. Yet, it was clear that intervention still needs some reflection on the tools, legal presumptions and economic findings. Do not expect big changes in competition law any time soon. But the scene is set for a more vigorous enforcement and a sharpened view for the role of platforms, data and innovation. And finally, the conference disproved Milton Friedman in at least one issue: There was such a thing as a free lunch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Photo credits go to Fiona Scott Morton…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Do say:<\/strong> \u201eI tell this to my kids all the time: Just\nbecause others do it, is no reason you have to do it.\u201c (Karen Yeung when the\nEconomist\u2019s Hal Hodson asked her whether Europe loses the race with China)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do not say:<\/strong> \u201eAnd what does this mean for Siemens\/Alstom?\u201c<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meet the latest conference host in the Brussels circuit \u2013 it is no one else but Commissioner Margrethe Vestager. She made her entry into that market with a bang: Presenting a Nobel prize winner and other notable and notorious figures for free. Someone obviously learned the \u201cthink big and make it free\u201d lesson from Silicon Valley\u2026 The conference about the future of competition policy was heavily overbooked, but Rupprecht Podszun was one of the 700 or so in the Charlemagne…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31,132,64,239,216,20],"class_list":["post-1691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-allgemein","tag-chief-technologist","tag-conference-debriefing","tag-dg-competition","tag-future-of-competition","tag-regulierung","tag-vestager"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.0","language":"en","enabled_languages":["de","en"],"languages":{"de":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1691"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1751,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691\/revisions\/1751"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}