Closing Remarks

Well, thanks again.  You have to put up with me for another couple of minutes at the end of this.  Let me start by saying, of course it was an interesting day.  I want to say emphatically that I applaud the work that the competition agencies are doing, both in enforcement and in regulation.  They are doing hard deserving important work and so I do not want to leave anybody with the impression that I am not completely behind it.  That is also true of what Jose said.  Competition agencies have the tools they have, and so it is a fact that’s what you have to work with.  But then I want to go back to what Richard was saying.  It is inspiring to see what the FTC and the DoJ have achieved in their mandate.  I want to emphasise in particular cases like the complaint on Apple by the DoJ or the complaint on Amazon by the FTC, both of which have yet to go to court.  It will depend on the facts, and there will be a long journey but what is remarkable about these two complaints is that in both cases, the agencies have made an effort to try and develop a case which is holistic.  It’s not about a single little practice, not a single little piece which is the inherent problem with competition enforcement.  There has been an attempt to do “ecosystem” cases, a proto-attempt but it is still very deserving.

So I think this is all absolutely important and I wouldn’t want to change a word.  That said, my big pitch is that competition agencies need to come out of their silo because if you are in a silo, you become increasingly irrelevant.  The political economy under you is moving.  Power is continuing to grow.  We are not effectively really dispersing that because even if we make the green bubbles talk to the blue bubbles on this phone, even if we get a couple more Appstores, this does not disperse the power.  Nor does it create necessarily this boom of innovation that we’d all like to see and by the way, this discussion around innovation has been undermined for years by the narrative of the dominant companies and bigtech.  I hear you, Marie-Angela, but you know very well that the notion that we should not touch because innovation may die, competition regulation is going to be adverse to competition is the old chestnut that we’ve all been operating under for decades.  This is the narrative of bigtech that essentially if we do anything in the area of enforcement and regulation, we kill innovation.  This is the “Type 1 error” that we have operated under for years, and it is something we should forget.  It isn’t true, there is no evidence for it.  What is actually undermining European competitiveness and productivity is not excess regulation.  We all know that.  We are a Continent of 27 countries, all very dispersed and different, with different cultures, with all sorts of problems that are identified in the Letta/Draghi reports.  I don’t tell you anything new but it isn’t excess regulation that undermines European innovation.  So I think we should absolutely forget that.

The one area where we need innovation, and there I agree entirely with Alexei, is in anti-trust.  We are so boring.  We are not doing anything new.  We continue to do the same cases with the same theories of harm, all of the time, something that Yannis has also pointed to.  Why can’t we be a little bit more creative?  Why can’t we be a little bit more imaginative?  Let’s try it out.  Take AI as an example.  Nuno mentioned and it was absolutely well-put.  We are admiring the problem.  This is an industry which is evolving under us in which the giants are grandfathering their current massive market power into the future.  What are we doing?  Oh, we are doing merger investigations.  My cat knows that there isn’t a merger there.  It isn’t a case that Microsoft/Mistral is a merger.  Microsoft/Open AI isn’t a merger.  Why are we even talking about a merger?  We know what a merger is.  This isn’t a merger.  What is going on in these cases is something else.  Let’s call it with its name.  The real name is weaponising aggressively interdependent networks of assets to occupy new spaces and pre-empt competition.  That is the theory of harm.  That’s the tweet.  So why can’t we actually pursue that in that form, and have to go back to some sort of notion of oh maybe they are tying, maybe they are bundling.  This is boring.  This is lacking in imagination and I think that that is really what is holding us back as well as the notion – and I conclude – that we shouldn’t be thinking outside the box.  Well, you know what else can we do?  If you can’t really kind of do what one wants to do, meaning create this level playing field, let’s think about alternative ways in which we can create open stores, we can create infrastructure that is open and not dependent on these entities, and maybe there will be an additional opportunity, a complementary opportunity for business to flourish but I think the lack of imagination is what’s holding us back.  Thank you very much.