{"id":9644,"date":"2024-07-12T12:33:41","date_gmt":"2024-07-12T10:33:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/?p=9644"},"modified":"2024-08-15T17:06:08","modified_gmt":"2024-08-15T15:06:08","slug":"conference-debriefing-42-19th-annual-conference-of-ascola","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.d-kart.de\/en\/blog\/2024\/07\/12\/conference-debriefing-42-19th-annual-conference-of-ascola\/","title":{"rendered":"Conference Debriefing (42): 19th Annual Conference of ASCOLA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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PDF-Version: Click here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suggested Citation: Podszun, DKartJ 2024, 38-44<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

More than 150 competition law scholars from around the world gathered in W\u00fcrzburg to celebrate their job choice \u2013 could it be any better than being an academic dealing with the hottest topic on earth? This was the Annual Conference of the Academic Society for Competition Law (ASCOLA). D\u2019Kart interviewed Rupprecht Podszun<\/strong>, the chairman of ASCOLA, to get a conference debriefing. Here are his insights on trends in antitrust research, German embarrassment, the winner of the best paper award, new stars on stage and a very short panel appearance by an antitrust high-flyer!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Name of the event: <\/strong>19th<\/sup> Annual Conference of the Academic Society for Competition Law (ASCOLA)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Place & time: <\/strong>University of W\u00fcrzburg, Germany, 4-7 July 2024. Key events took place in the Neubaukirche<\/em>, a baroque church-turned-lecture hall. Awe-inspiring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hosts: <\/strong>The conference is an ASCOLA event, but of course the work lies with the local hosts – they are the ones running the show (and a show it was!): Professor Dr. Florian Bien and Dr. Bj\u00f6rn Becker, pictured above, and their team directed the event. They did an awesome job!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Participants: <\/strong>Competition law scholars from around the world from A (as Oles Andryichuk, the philosopher of antitrust \u2013 just changed to Exeter University) to Z (as Bernadette Zelger who won an Antitrust Writing Award this year for a paper on ne bis in idem<\/em>). There were well-known ASCOLA big names such as Alexandre de Streel or former president Michal Gal, but \u2013 as usual \u2013 also many first-timers. A young delegation from Berlin was greeted with particular affection: Simon de Ridder, Lennart Enwaldt, Philipp Hornung and Maximilian Wolters are PhD students who started their PhDs with the late Heike Schweitzer<\/a> who was dearly missed. Her team of young scholars at least offered a glimmer of hope that her legacy lives on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Food & drinks:<\/strong> An awesome barbecue, a wine-tasting in an ancient cellar \u2013 couldn\u2019t have been better!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Alba Ribera Mart\u00ednez<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Johannes Rottmann<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Juliana Oliveira Domingues<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Belle Beems<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Kalpana Tiyagi<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Xiaomin Fang with Jan Broulik<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Question:<\/em> Sorry, but these days are a bit busy with football, elections in the UK and France, Joe Biden, raging wars, and Taylor Swift on tour \u2013 I wanted to ignore the ASCOLA conference to be frank. A mistake?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Answer:<\/em> Unwise! It would be so much more efficient<\/em> to do competition law, since all the topics you mentioned are of course topics for the community. The issues can be analysed through the lens of power and nearly everything can be better with competition… I am exaggerating of course, but I was also surprised that the debates you mentioned did not play such a big role at ASCOLA. Judging from the titles, there was not a single paper on football, and none on war!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: You\u2019re losing me.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: Shake it off, shake it off. The reaction of antitrust researchers to the global crises is a different one: Papers turn fundamental! The young ones go to the very bottom of competition law concepts and deconstrue them. Take Andrew McLean for instance. He said that the \u201cinnovation defence\u201d (you cannot stop our merger because we are so innovative<\/em>) is just a rebranding of the Chicago School\u2019s ideological \u201ctechno-conservatism\u201d. Imagine: Innovation has no longer a positive connotation!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Masako Wakui & Greg Day<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Spencer Waller inviting to the US<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Americans<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Q: Wait, the Schumpeter\/Arrow controversy on the effects of competition on innovation ended with an inverted U curve \u2013 U as in undecided, right? Schumpeter wants monopolies, Arrow wants competition, and now McLean wants a U-turn?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: According to McLean, there is evidence that the inverted U nowadays looks more like a lazy L. Of course, he cited Mariana Mazzucato (\u201cThe entrepreneurial state\u201d) who is the well-hyped defender of state intervention in innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: Adam Smith must rotate in his Canongate Kirkyard in Edinburgh when hearing an Edinburgh scholar promote such stuff\u2026<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: Not so fast! Stavros Makris who works at Glasgow re-read Adam Smith, only to find out that the mainstream belief into what Smith had allegedly said is pretty flawed. Smith, so Makris argues, has not only identified the invisible hand of the market, but also a very visible hand of the public authorities who need to guarantee many functions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: Adam Smith was the first ordoliberal?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: Or so it seems. Ordoliberals are definitely back. Tristan Rohner and Helena Drewes, currently both working at my chair, argued in favour of \u201ccompetition on the merits\u201d as a benchmark for abuse cases. They say the concept could effectively remedy problems with the \u201cmore economic approach\u201d. Did you know that \u201ccompetition on the merits\u201d was invented as a concept for a predatory pricing case with petrol stations in Benrath, close to D\u00fcsseldorf, in 1930? As Tristan and Helena showed some of the confusion with the concept lies in the fact that the term was lost in translation in EU jurisprudence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: Wait. You say, they are \u201ccurrently\u201d working at your chair. Any job market gossip?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: Tristan Rohner will leave us, he was appointed a Junior Professor with tenure track at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: Wow, congrats! I mean, sorry for you! Hamburg could be the next D\u00fcsseldorf, the competition law capital of Germany! Or at least a good competitor to your Rhine dominion!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: Nanana. Don\u2019t want to hear that, but I concede that with Florian Wagner-von Papp at the University of the Armed Forces, Wolfgang Wurmnest at Hamburg University and Tristan at Bucerius it is a place to watch\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: And there is the Hamburg Max Planck Institute!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: They do only little competition law there, nowadays, but the books that the late Ernst-Joachim Mestm\u00e4cker held in his hands are still there. Oh, by the way, over dinner I overheard a great scholar saying she would love to be able to read German. Asked why, she replied: to read Mestm\u00e4cker in the original. A colleague whispered to me: Would Kafka or Goethe be an option, maybe, too?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: Amazing academics!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: You said Amazon?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: No, amazing. But speaking of Amazon\u2026 I assume Big Tech was Big Topic?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: The only time I heard the term \u201cAmazon\u201d during this conference was when Francisco Beneke from the Munich Max Planck talked about sustainability in Latin America \u2013 and Amazon here did not refer to a gatekeeper, but a CO2<\/sub>-keeper. Of course, there were several panels on digital and data, but it was not as dominant as I would have expected it to be. In a final wrap-up panel of the conference, Masako Wakui, a thought leader from Japan, characterised the conference as not having \u201chot topics\u201d \u2013 which she meant in a positive way. In times of global warming \u201chot\u201d has lost its appeal anyway. Scholars turn to a variety of topics and ideas, these days. The digital frenzy seems over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: Still, there must have been some trends in digital competition law?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: The spectre was pretty well given in a breakout session Digital I<\/em> that I attended: Richard Li-dar Wang (National Chengchi University Taiwan) gave a very interesting account of how to measure efficacy of the new rules that we have in place. Jasper van den Boom from D\u00fcsseldorf (heyho!) \u2013 who had another very memorable moment at this conference \u2013 discussed Bytedance\u2019s role as a gatekeeper in the DMA from a conceptual ecosystem perspective. And Marco Botta of EUI went into the legal clash of privacy rules and DMA. All three were no longer in this \u201cwe have to do something\u201d-mode, but much more down to earth, dissecting the rules. In the wrap-up panel, Wolfgang Kerber, the economist, said he noticed as a trend throughout the conference that lawyers do legal reasoning again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Wolfgang Kerber<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Nils Imgarten<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Wolfgang Wurmnest<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Anna Gerbrandy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Andreas Fuchs with Dimitri Tzouganatis<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Piero Alexis Malca Vilchez<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Q: Hear, hear.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: Really! And he is right. In antitrust, we did a lot of economics effects analysis. Now, more and more lawyers look into standards of proof, the exact meaning of words in legal texts or the reconciliation of rules from different fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: That sounds dull.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: And it is not! Because there is a world to discover! And there is a lot of inspiration from other fields: If you do not reduce competition law to a reductionist economic concept, you can do really interesting stuff. Todd Davies from UCL, for instance, gave a talk on \u201cniche theory\u201d from ecology as a way to understand competition law. And in the same panel, Gregory Day (University of Georgia, USA), gave a historical account of US antitrust law \u2013 explaining the Sherman Act with a view to the Reconstruction era that preceded it. It was fascinating to hear Greg relate the anti-slavery fight of John Sherman with later discrimination cases. Antitrust\u2019s promises are still unfulfilled, he says. But what I want to say is: There is a huge diversity and variety of approaches. That is probably the characteristic thing of academic research in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: Let\u2019s talk about the stars of the conference.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: You mean David Bosco, Liang Li and the Bien Brothers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: Oh, I thought Andreas Mundt and his peers on the Enforcers Panel were the stars of this conference?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: Right, yes, they were of course, but this conference also made new stars, too. Let\u2019s discuss the enforcers first: There was Andreas Mundt from Germany \u2013 who is the boss of our sister organisation, the International Competition Network (ICN). Every time I see him on stage I am impressed how straight-forward he is in his messages, how witty he is in his answers and how well he plays the audiences. He shared the panel with Beno\u00eet Coeur\u00e9 from France, Ryan J. Danks from the US Department of Justice and Juliana Oliveira Domingues, a long-time ASCOLA member who had served as the Attorney General of CADE, the Brazilian enforcer. Coeur\u00e9 became an asset for the community ever since he joined the club as an outsider, coming from Finance. The show was stolen though by Doris Tshepe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Enforcers Panel with Ryan Danks, Benoit Coeur\u00e9, Bj\u00f6rn Becker & Florian Bien, Juliana Oliveira Domingues and Andreas Mundt. (All photos by Wolfram Merger, unless otherwise noted.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Q: She is the South African commissioner for competition, right?<\/h3>\n\n\n
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Andreas Mundt & Doris Tshepe.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

A: Exactly. She flew in from an UNCTAD meeting in Geneva, landing in Frankfurt, jumping on a car, flying over the Autobahn, joining the panel 20 minutes before it closed, taking off the next morning to Greece. In between, she rocked the thing. A bit Hollywood style, this fly-in-fly-out, but then they are<\/em> the stars. Or, as Andreas Mundt put it: What would you academics chew on if not for us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: Haha, there you go, theorists! Nothing worth without practice!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: Luckily, Mundt also said, it is a two-way street. To give an example of the impact of academic literature on the Bundeskartellamt\u2019s practice he cited work by Richard Schmalensee and David Evans on platforms. They were heavily influential, he said, for the design of section 19a, that competition law gatekeeper rule in Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: Ouch. Not the luckiest pick of references, right?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A: Mundt had participated in an Oxford workshop at Ariel Ezrachi\u2019s a week before where \u2013 under Chatham House rules \u2013 it had been a big topic, as we understand, that academics can no longer be trusted since so many of them are paid for by big corporations. Evans and Schmalensee are certainly renowned economists, but both of them have been on the Big Tech payroll. But then they are not ASCOLA members. ASCOLA has an Ethics Declaration<\/a> in place, requiring its members to disclose all funding properly. More to be done, as Ioannis Lianos (back in academia after his time as the boss of the Hellenic competition agency) does not get tired to assert. But, to do justice to Andreas Mundt: When I asked all those people to stand up who are in favour of a break up of Alphabet, Mundt jumped to his feet \u2013 as did maybe a third of participants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The ASCOLA Assembly taking a vote. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Conference Innovations:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conference had 72 papers with speakers from all continents. They had been selected from roughly 150 submissions in a double blind peer review process. Among the innovations in the conference format this year:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n