Summer’s Top Antitrust Stories: Serving up your post-holiday cheat sheet

Digital markets have stayed firmly on global antitrust authorities’ agendas over the summer months:

• Following several high-profile “incumbent/challenger” acquisitions in the tech space, competition authorities have been busy reforming their merger control rules to facilitate the review of more deals, especially potential killer acquisitions.
• In terms of regulation, we are edging closer to the Digital Markets Act coming into force in October and applying from Spring 2023. Will the DMA set the global standard for digital market regulation? And what can we learn from Germany?
• We may also see progress in the US if rules introduced in both houses of Congress that would significantly alter the regulatory landscape for certain covered platforms are debated as expected in the next term in November.
• Proposed guidelines in China designed to regulate platforms in a similar way to the DMA may also be on the cards.
• Conversely, the UK looks set to fall behind other regulators, with the final implementing legislation for the CMA’s Digital Markets Unit possibly being delayed by a year.

To get up to speed on what’s been happening and to unlock all of our recent insights on these stories and more, take a look at our handy post-summer cheat sheet on LinkingCompetition.