As this new edition of The Dominance and Monopolies Review will show, several of the trends that were apparent in the previous few years have continued – except that commitment decisions in Europe seem to be falling out of favour and the Commission is returning to more old-fashioned punitive enforcement. Most obvious perhaps is the ongoing disruption of traditional sectors of the economy by the emergence of digital services and online distribution. This has led to a series of cases and pending investigations in various jurisdictions involving online and IT firms, across a diverse range of companies.
Two trends in this context deserve special attention, and are looked at by the various jurisdictional chapters. The first is the threatened re-emergence of form-based analysis, at the expense of the economic analysis of dominance and foreclosure effect in abuse cases; the second is the ongoing politicisation of the competition process.
