Intersectional developments in EU competition law: a case study on Meta v. Bundeskartellamt

While in the 1870s Standard Oil controlled 90% of the petroleum market in the United States, in 2017 Amazon captured half of all dollars spent online in America, and Google has consistently maintained a global market share of 85-90% in the search engine industry in the last 15 years. According to structuralist scholars, permitting “Big Tech” companies to attain such a dominance already signals the failure of competition law and authorities to adequately regulate the market. Conversely, according to the neoclassical strand of the scholarship, traditional antitrust methods (which, in their opinion, should only stick to economic considerations and not social goals) are capable, with some caveats, of fixing digital anticompetitive conducts. In the view of this thesis, current competition law and enforcement needs modernization to cope with the innovative challenges posed by the digital economy. To help future regulators determine the best strategies to develop a modernized and multidisciplinary EU antitrust approach towards digital competition, we will concentrate on an economic and legal analysis of online and offline markets. Firstly, we will introduce similarities and differences in antitrust between the EU and the US. We will then analyze the current instruments and methodology of EU and US competition law and enforcement, highlighting how the role of antitrust in the EU has distinguished itself from the US predecessor by favoring social values and consumer rights over a mere focus on economic efficiency. Consequently, we will illustrate the lengths to which markets have structurally transformed under the data economy, outlining popular innovative business strategies posing a risk for consumers that should be addressed by competition law. We will finally analyze the recent trends of the jurisprudence of the CJEU on the adoption of a multidisciplinary competition law approach in digital markets, highlighting the necessity of the interaction between competition, data protection and EU fundamental rights law.