Every Click You Make: Article 6(5)’s Search for a Limiting Principle
When does a “directions” button become a competition-law violation? When it points to Google Maps, according to the European Commission. A law meant to police search rankings is becoming a license to police the whole page. On July 23, the Commission fined Alphabet €460 million for favoring nine of its own services on Google’s search ... Every Click You Make: Article 6(5)’s Search for a Limiting Principle
The DMA’s Magic Words and Missing Off Switch
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) depends on two terms that lawmakers never defined. “Fairness” and “contestability” determine how the European Commission measures gatekeeper compliance, imposes new obligations, and grades its own performance every three years. The law uses both terms liberally but explains neither. Recital 79 even promises that the Commission will apply ... The DMA’s Magic Words and Missing Off Switch
The Crime of Winning: How Europe’s DMA Punishes Google for Competing
Brussels has found a new way to punish success. Today, the European Commission fined Google €890 million under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) for two familiar business practices—featuring its own products and charging for customers its platform helps attract. The Commission imposed €460 million for “self-preferencing,” or giving Google’s services prominent placement in search results, ... The Crime of Winning: How Europe’s DMA Punishes Google for Competing
The DMA’s Cloud-Cuckoo Land
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) was built to police digital gatekeepers. The European Commission now wants to test how far that metaphor can stretch—past app stores, social networks, and marketplaces, and into the server racks. The Commission has reached the preliminary view that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure should be designated as gatekeepers ... The DMA’s Cloud-Cuckoo Land
Fit for Purpose, Unfit for Review: Why the DMA’s First Evaluation Could Never Find Failure
The first review of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) reads less like an evaluation than a wellness check performed by the patient’s proud parent. The pulse is strong. The color is good. Any lingering symptoms? Too early to tell. On April 28, 2026, the European Commission published the review required under Article 53 and declared ... Fit for Purpose, Unfit for Review: Why the DMA’s First Evaluation Could Never Find Failure
If at First Consumers Don’t Switch, Regulate Again
Under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), consumers are apparently sovereign—right up until they choose the wrong thing. When Mozilla reports that Firefox is now selected through a DMA browser-choice screen once every 10 seconds—more than 6 million selections in total, with daily active iOS users 113% higher in the European Union than they would have ... If at First Consumers Don’t Switch, Regulate Again
How China Accidentally Made Consumer Welfare Cool Again
The consumer welfare standard was supposed to be on the defensive. After nearly a decade of attacks from the neo-Brandeisian movement, critics had cast it as too narrow, too technocratic, and too forgiving of “Big Tech.” Yet the standard’s most important new ally may turn out to be an unexpected one: geopolitics. The consumer welfare ... How China Accidentally Made Consumer Welfare Cool Again
Merger Guidelines for the Industrial Policy Curious
The European Commission published its draft “guidelines on the assessment of mergers under Council Regulation (EC) No 139/2004 on the control of concentrations between undertakings” yesterday. The title does what titles of merger guidelines usually do: it lowers expectations. That is useful misdirection. The document itself is anything but dull. The draft guidelines span more ... Merger Guidelines for the Industrial Policy Curious
The Hidden Premise: Smuggling Paternalism Through the Back Door
A familiar pattern has taken hold in platform regulation—and in the academic and policy commentary that surrounds it. Critics spot a real phenomenon, recast it as market failure, and then press for intervention that far outstrips what the evidence can support. The result: arguments that read as persuasive but collapse under scrutiny. They conflate distinct ... The Hidden Premise: Smuggling Paternalism Through the Back Door
The Nanny State Goes Shopping
Antitrust used to ask a simple question: are firms making consumers worse off? Increasingly, it asks a different one: are consumers making the “wrong” choices? The consumer welfare standard (CWS) often draws criticism as narrow or inattentive to broader concerns. That familiar critique rests on a basic misunderstanding of what the standard is designed to ... The Nanny State Goes Shopping
Cloudy Logic: The DMA’s Search for a Gatekeeper
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) was supposed to target gatekeepers. Instead, it is chasing a market that has no gate. Last November, the European Commission opened three market investigations into whether Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure qualify as gatekeepers under the DMA—even as it acknowledged that no cloud service provider meets the act’s own ... Cloudy Logic: The DMA’s Search for a Gatekeeper
The DMA’s Case Against Seamlessness
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) does not just regulate competition—it redesigns how digital products work. The DMA is often framed as a pro-consumer reform—a necessary intervention to “rein in gatekeepers” and restore fairness and contestability in digital markets. That framing obscures a more ambitious—and more troubling—project. At its core, the DMA empowers EU ... The DMA’s Case Against Seamlessness
