Shaping Competition in the Digital Age (SCiDA)

Anush Ganesh

Welcome to the Shaping Competition in the Digital Age (SCiDA) podcast, where we explore the evolving landscape of digital competition regulation in Europe and beyond. Hosted by Dr Anush Ganesh (Leeds, UK), Dr Kena Zheng (Düsseldorf, DE), Dr Jasper van den Boom (Leiden, NL) and Dr Ece Ban (Exeter, UK). This podcast brings you in-depth conversations with leading academics, policymakers, and practitioners about the challenges and opportunities in regulating Big Tech. See our episodes from 2024 here- https://open.spotify.com/show/7m4Jiollzt4GmGtUF7bYKZ?si=e649beaf35db4147

  1. 1d ago

    Episode 46- Democratic Antitrust for Digital Markets - Viktoria Robertson

    In this episode of the SCiDA podcast, Anush Ganesh and Jasper van den Boom speak with Professor Viktoria Robertson about her new book, "Democratic Antitrust for Digital Markets, Leveraging Competition Law for Liberal Democracy", out now with Hart Publishing. Vicky is Full Professor of Commercial Law, Competition Law and Digitalization at WU Vienna, where she heads the Competition Law and Digitalization Group. She also directs The Competition Law Hub. Drawing on competition law in Canada, the EU and the US, her book argues that platforms which control the infrastructure of public debate hold political power that no democratic process has legitimised, and that competition law has both the tools and the mandate to respond. We discuss why antitrust was never politically neutral, and her three approaches to democratic antitrust, from rigorous ordinary enforcement to external benchmarks after Meta Platforms v Bundeskartellamt. We also cover data, opinion and political power, the risk of antitrust being turned into a political weapon in the US, media pluralism in merger control, and remedies such as alternative recommendation algorithms and the “smart cut”. Along the way we talk about lobbying, transparency in academic research, and why Vicky remains optimistic about liberal democracy.

  2. Nov 3

    Episode 45- Equality, Capture and the Attention Economy - Elettra Bietti

    In this episode of the SCiDA podcast, Anush Ganesh speaks with Dr Elettra Bietti, Associate Professor of Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University, about three of her recent papers on how law should respond to the power of Big Tech. We start with Egalitarian Antitrust, which won the best paper award at ASCOLA 2025. Elettra draws on John Rawls to argue that antitrust has an egalitarian mission, and she explains why the field should stop leaving questions of distribution to tax law. We also discuss how workers and small businesses might be allowed to coordinate to build countervailing power. Next is Technological Capture, co-authored with Anne Bellon, which rethinks George Stigler’s account of regulatory capture for the platform age. Elettra sets out the four forms of power that tech firms use to shape regulation, namely instrumental, epistemic, connective and architectural power, and considers how well the EU DMA and the UK DMCCA can hold up against them. Finally, we turn to The Data-Attention Imperative and her argument that data and attention drive platform business models together. Elettra explains why more competition may not solve the problem of attention extraction and makes the case for adding friction through design, an attention tax and litigation. She also gives her views on whether data can or should be valued in monetary terms, and on whether any of these remedies are realistic under the second Trump administration. This conversation is for anyone interested in antitrust, platform regulation, political economy and the future of the digital economy.

  3. Oct 27

    Episode 44 - An Economist’s View of 102, the CAT, and Mergers in the Digital Markets era - Thomas Bowman

    In this episode Anush Ganesh and Ece Ban are joined by Thomas Bowman, Senior Vice President at Compass Lexecon in London. Thomas is an economist with more than a decade of experience on competition cases spanning abuse of dominance, merger control and damages litigation, and he has deep knowledge of the tech sector. He has worked on some of the defining tech cases of recent years, including the European Commission’s Qualcomm exclusivity and predation cases and the Google/Fitbit and Nvidia/Arm mergers. In the UK he has worked on the Which? class action against Qualcomm and for the merchant claimants in the interchange fee litigation before the Competition Appeal Tribunal. He was named a Future Leader among competition economists by Lexology Index in 2024 and 2025. Tom starts by explaining what drew him to competition economics. He then turns to the Commission’s new Guidelines on exclusionary abuses under Article 102 TFEU. Drawing on his work on Qualcomm, he considers how far the Guidelines move away from effects-based analysis, and whether the Qualcomm exclusivity case would end differently now that no counterfactual is needed to establish causation. He explains why cost benchmarks such as LRAIC matter as proxies in predation cases and responds to the shift away from profit sacrifice towards below-cost pricing. He also identifies one way the final Guidelines improve on the 2024 draft from an economic perspective and one way they still fall short. The conversation then moves from Brussels to the CAT. Tom compares acting as a party’s economist before the Commission with serving as an expert witness whose duty is to the tribunal. He discusses whether the 2025 Practice Direction is pushing the CAT in a more inquisitorial direction on expert evidence, and how the role of economists in collective proceedings has changed. Finally, he weighs the speed of the DMA against the dialogue-led approach of the UK’s DMCCA regime.

  4. Oct 22

    Episode 43- Systemic Market Power and the Case for Sector Investigations - Juliane Mendelsohn and Annika Stöhr

    In this episode of the SCiDA podcast, Kena Zheng and Anush Ganesh are joined by Jun.-Prof. Dr. Juliane Mendelsohn and Dr. Annika Stöhr of TU Ilmenau to discuss their new paper, “Systemic Market Power and the Case for Sector Investigations. Towards a Coherent Framework in European Competition Law”. Large digital firms often hold enormous power without being dominant in any single market. Their strength comes from controlling whole ecosystems of connected services, something traditional competition law, which looks at one market at a time, struggles to capture. Juliane and Annika introduce the concept of systemic market power to describe this ecosystem-wide power and argue that competition authorities should be able to investigate entire sectors rather than individual markets. They sketch a two-stage EU sector investigation tool, with an investigative first stage and a second stage allowing targeted remedies where serious problems are found. The conversation covers how their proposal compares with the EU Digital Markets Act, the UK Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act and the German sector inquiry rules, how economists might measure power that does not show up in market shares, how to stop such a tool from becoming too broad, and what effective remedies could look like. Juliane also reflects on her earlier work on systemic risk in banking, and Annika shares her experience as an economist working on competition law.

  5. Oct 12

    Episode 42- Empirical Analysis of Digital Market Case References - Joanna Mazur

    In this episode, Anush Ganesh and Ece Ban are joined by Dr Joanna Mazur, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Management at the University of Warsaw and analyst at the Centre of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies and DELab UW. Joanna shares her empirical research on how the European Commission gathers and relies on expert knowledge in competition cases involving digital markets, drawing on nearly 2,900 references across 17 decisions concerning Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft. We discuss the gaps in Regulation 1/2003 and the Merger Regulation on who counts as a source of expertise, the dominance of market participants’ replies to requests for information and what that means for smaller players, and the quiet influence of commercial providers such as Gartner, IDC and Statista on how markets are framed. Joanna also reflects on the Onavo data in Facebook/WhatsApp as a case study in informational asymmetry, the striking absence of academic scholarship from the decisions, and the idea that the Commission relies on borrowed expertise when it comes to how digital markets actually work. We ask Joanna would make to how the Commission gathers and discloses its sources. She also shares some pieces of advice for future scholars wanting to engage in empirical legal analysis.

  6. Oct 5

    Episode 41- Early Career Voices in Digital Competition Law - Pol Adroher Bernal, Chloé Djamdji and Emanuela Lecchi

    In this episode of the SCiDA podcast, Anush Ganesh and Ece Ban are joined by three early career scholars researching different aspects of digital competition law, from commitment decisions and the interplay between the DMA and Article 102 TFEU to ecosystem mergers. Pol Adroher Bernal, PhD Candidate in EU Competition Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, discusses his paper on the unchecked discretion surrounding commitment decisions under Article 9 of Regulation 1/2003 in digital markets. He explains the private enforcement and proportionality gaps that systematic reliance on commitments can create, revisits Alrosa and AG Kokott's middle path, and sets out his proposal for a minimum proportionality requirement calibrated to market dynamism and the risk of irreversible harm. Chloé Djamdji, PhD Candidate in Competition Law at Université Côte d'Azur, introduces the concept of normative synergy between the Digital Markets Act and Article 102 TFEU. She explores whether the DMA can reach AI players such as OpenAI and Nvidia and presents a hybrid model combining ex ante and ex post approaches, set against the new Article 102 Guidelines and the Meta WhatsApp interim measures. Emanuela Lecchi, Lecturer in Competition Law and Regulation at the University of Dundee, examines ecosystem mergers through the contrast between de-entrenchment and regulated entrenchment, where regulation such as the DMA becomes a reason to clear a deal and rely on behavioural obligations. She discusses how quantitative tools could strengthen entrenchment analysis in cases like Booking Holdings and reflects on Microsoft/Activision and the CMA's December 2025 remedies guidance. All three will be presenting their work at the ECR conference at the University of Glasgow on 12 and 13 November 2026.

  7. Sep 22

    Episode 40- Unpacking the Commission's Article 102 Guidelines - Simon de Ridder and Ece Ban

    In this episode, Anush Ganesh sits with Dr Ece Ban from the University of Exeter and Simon de Ridder from Humboldt University of Berlin to discuss the European Commission's newly adopted Guidelines on exclusionary abuses under Article 102 TFEU. Two years in the making, the final text differs noticeably from the draft consulted on in 2024. The conversation opens with first impressions before turning to the two-pronged test for exclusionary abuse and whether the Guidelines offer a clearer, more operational definition of competition on the merits. We then look at how the presumptions of exclusionary effects have been recast as varying in strength and scope, and whether the sliding scale of evidence makes the Commission's decisions easier to review on appeal or widens its margin of discretion. We discuss what exclusive dealing arrangements a dominant supplier could safely sign off on, whether the Commission is inviting the Court to align by-nature abuses with Article 101 object restrictions, and what replaces the as-efficient competitor benchmark in non-pricing cases, alongside the treatment of predatory pricing and margin squeeze. Finally, we place the Guidelines within the wider modernisation of EU competition policy, reading them alongside the draft Merger Guidelines and the Draghi Report's call for predictability, and ask whether leaving exploitative abuses aside was a missed opportunity.

  8. Sep 1

    Episode 39- The Role of Civil Society in Digital Markets Regulation - Maria Luisa Stasi and Jithendra Palepu

    What role does civil society actually play in making the Digital Markets Act work? In this episode Anush and Jasper speak with Dr Maria Luisa Stasi, Head of Law and Policy for Digital Markets at ARTICLE 19, and Jithendra Palepu, Project Manager at the Free Software Foundation Europe, two organisations that have moved well beyond advocacy into producing the evidence, complaints and litigation that DMA enforcement now runs on. We trace how ARTICLE19's contribution to the first DMA review and its complaint on Apple's compliance with Articles 6(4) and 6(7) sit alongside FSFE's own investigations into Apple's interoperability mechanism and Google's governance of AOSP, and how both organisations ended up inside the courtroom. We discuss FSFE's role as an intervener in Apple v Commission before the General Court, and Maria Luisa's role as Class Representative in her own collective action against Microsoft worth over two billion pounds before the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal. Along the way we get into the joint civil society complaint against Alphabet, the coalition work behind it, and what public and private enforcement each bring to the table that the other cannot. A conversation for anyone interested in how digital markets regulation actually gets enforced, and the organisations doing that work from outside government. You can find details of ARTICLE 19's DMA Symposium here: https://www.article19.org/digital-markets-act-from-solo-act-to-orchestra/

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Welcome to the Shaping Competition in the Digital Age (SCiDA) podcast, where we explore the evolving landscape of digital competition regulation in Europe and beyond. Hosted by Dr Anush Ganesh (Leeds, UK), Dr Kena Zheng (Düsseldorf, DE), Dr Jasper van den Boom (Leiden, NL) and Dr Ece Ban (Exeter, UK). This podcast brings you in-depth conversations with leading academics, policymakers, and practitioners about the challenges and opportunities in regulating Big Tech. See our episodes from 2024 here- https://open.spotify.com/show/7m4Jiollzt4GmGtUF7bYKZ?si=e649beaf35db4147

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