Comment by SllX
5 days ago
Please note not only what I wrote but what I was directly responding to when I wrote it.
> It's a complex thing in practice, don't take the linguistic definition of the word itself as the sole interpretation of the law.
I am aware; however I am still waiting for the solid argument that Facebook is a monopoly to be made in either an EU legal context (not “gatekeeper”, not “very large online platform”, monopoly) or an American legal context.
Facebook being a monopoly is irrelevant to EU competition laws. These laws are strictly interested in fostering competitive markets and broadly cares about all sorts of anticompetitive behaviours. They are in no way interested in monopolies and I don’t think being a monopoly is a prerequisite for any of them. The closest notion will be dominant position but that’s a far weaker criteria itself irrelevant to the DMA.
Setting aside the DMA and DSA entirely as I already explained to someone else earlier why the DMA wasn’t an antimonopoly law and I don’t want these newer laws to get in the way of my questions: put another way, the EU does not have an antimonopoly law on the books? Article 102 of the TFEU seems to back that up, but I’m understanding you correctly here, the EU just doesn’t have an antimonopoly law?
So before I start telling EU citizens to sod off for dragging the word “monopoly” into these discussions regarding Facebook’s or any other company’s monopoly status within the EU which by your account doesn’t seem to have the means to even determine that nor a body of law built up around the concept, do any of the member nations have their own anti-monopoly laws? Or have all of their own competition laws up to and including any real or hypothetical antimonopoly laws been preempted by the TFEU?
I don’t understand your first paragraph.
The EU has competition law (like the USA to be honest). Competition law is a lot broader than simply being against monopoly which is why I don’t understand why you mention monopolies. Monopolies are an extreme form of disfunction in competitive markets. There are a lot of emphasis on market dominance in the EU law which is itself a concept broader than monopolies. A monopoly is necessary a dominant player so would fall under all the provision of article 102, yes.
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