Data protection and digital competition
by Ian Brown and Douwe Korff
More excitement as the world cleans up after Friday’s global IT chaos, caused directly by poor CrowdStrike testing processes and marking its software as essential to Windows booting — but indirectly by Microsoft allowing inadequately tested/sandboxed code to run in “kernel” mode on PCs, where it can/did cause a system crash on around 8.5m Windows PCs globally and billions of dollars of insured damage.
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Both the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority, and the European Commission’s Competition DG are looking for very senior “digital” experts for senior management roles. Unfortunately I think it’s a mistake to combine the two, as very few people have experience of both.
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Exciting news indeed from Brussels. Apparently X has told the European Commission it meets the criteria to be designated as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act 🤩🍿. If so, then we REALLY need the DMA Art. 7 messaging interoperability mandate expanded to social networking services, and aggressive enforcement of those existing provisions which would partly enable this.
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With X/Twitter, Elon Musk seems to be singlehandedly illustrating the exciting antitrust concept of Significant Non-transitory Decreases in Quality while having limited impact on X usage (thanks to network effects).
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I finally had time to watch the AI tech summit very well-organised by the US Federal Trade Commission on 25 January. I’ve tried to note some key points from each speaker.
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Cristina Caffarra’s annual competition-fest today in Brussels was as speaker- and content-packed as ever. As well as much discussion of the eagerly anticipated deadline for Digital Markets Act compliance in five weeks, it was a fascinating look beyond narrow antitrust policy to competition policy linkages with industrial and trade policy (with lots of AI on the side).
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Technology policy and regulation continues to need more input from technology experts. But please techies (I’m one myself): learn a little about policy and regulation as well?
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This Guardian article is helpful for containing so many of the questionable assumptions behind calls to strictly limit open source AI tools.
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In July 2022, Twitter had 61.9m users reachable by advertisers in the 27 EU member states — passing the 45m user hurdle for designation as a Very Large Online Platform under the DSA, and potentially a DMA gatekeeper.
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I enjoyed listening to Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke’s new book on competition policy and innovation more than I expected. How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation—and How to Strike Back is beautifully written and full of zingers.
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