CREATe and the School of Law, University of Glasgow, and The Competition Law Hub at Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna) are joining forces to organise a one-day workshop on market definition in Vienna on 20 November ahead of a special issue in the Journal of Antitrust Enforcement.
Background of the workshop
On 8 February 2024, the European Commission published its new Market Definition Notice 2024. This Notice consolidates knowledge and Commission practice of the last two decades as well as introducing new concepts. At the same time, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice published new US Merger Guidelines in December of 2023 that also address the question of the relevant market.
Against this background, the Journal of Antitrust Enforcement launched a call for papers to bring together scholarship in law and in economics addressing the changes introduced by these new soft law instruments, and their implications for competition law scholarship and practice. The selected papers will be published as a special issue, with Magali Eben and Vicky Robertson as guest editors.
In a one-day workshop on Wednesday, 20 November 2024, we discussed the draft papers and provided feedback on them.
A reflection from one of the workshop participants:
Fabian Ziermann, currently a Visiting Scholar in CREATe, joined the workshop in Vienna dedicated to the Special Issue. He is a Recipient of a DOC Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Science at the Competition Law and Digitalization Group of the WU Vienna and The Competition Law Hub. As such, he gives us an insight into one aspect which he believes needs some more discussion.
Revisiting Market Definition: Has the Commission’s new notice truly addressed market realities?
Given the anticipation in both academia and practice for the publication of the new Market Definition Notice, part of the assessment should be whether the Commission has met the bar it set itself in drafting this new soft law instrument. That bar, according to Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, is that the notice should ‘address new market realities’ and ensure that the Commission’s ‘guidance remains fit-for-purpose and effective in response to technological advances.’
With the recent prominence of video games and virtual worlds, and the hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), the opportunity was provided to discuss an AI-centric market definition for video games, taking into account both the Commission’s video games practice and the assessment of one of the most important inputs for AI: training data.
Much like AI in healthcare, where an AI trained to analyze the spread of certain types of cancer would not be given training data on Alzheimer’s and diabetes, as this would obscure its capabilities, AI in the video game industry is trained on data from specific game modes, i.e., small levels within a larger game. As a result, training data may not even be substitutable within a particular game, departing from the broad definitions of platform, game type, or genre proposed in the past.
In order to reflect new market realities, one might expect the Commission to place more emphasis on data and the delineation of data markets. However, other than mentioning data 15 times on 35 pages, instead of once on nine pages in the old notice, not much has changed.
Workshop programme & registration
You can find the programme below.
Check out our latest working paper, aptly examining market definition, and stay tuned for our upcoming events and research updates by subscribing to our newsletter.