The debate about competition issues and unfair practices specific to online platforms and the appropriate tools to tackle them was taken a step further by the European Commission (‘Commission’), which presented two legislative proposals on 15 December 2020: The Digital Services Act (‘DSA’) and the Digital Markets Act (‘DMA’). While the former is intended to regulate online content and increase transparency and accountability, the latter is intended to ensure contestable and fair markets in the digital sector by imposing limits (and...

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In the first Weekly Roar of what’s going to be a great new year: The EU continues to wheel-and-deal, wariness remains for some persistent global supply chain roadblocks, blockchain continues its uphill fight for relevancy, why rail is cool again, and the obligatory international doom and gloom (with a little positive thrown in.) It’s 2021, so let’s go! With Brexit checked off the to-do list (sort of), the European Union has struck a trade deal with China. There is a lot of opposition...

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Split along partisan lines, the Federal Trade Commission (Commission) voted last week to issue Commentary on Vertical Merger Enforcement (Commentary). The Commentary intends to “provide greater transparency to the public regarding analysis of vertical mergers” by collecting in a single document the Commission’s past vertical merger cases and summarizing how it has analyzed potential anticompetitive effects in vertical transactions. The two Democratic commissioners dissented here just as they had in June 2020, with respect to the issuance of the...

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