Shaping Competition in the Digital Age (SCiDA)

Anush Ganesh
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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 SCiDA team members: Dr Anush Ganesh (Leeds University), Dr Kena Zheng (HHU Düsseldorf) and Dr Jasper van den Boom (Leiden University). 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. Sep 1

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

    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/

  2. Aug 24

    Episode 38- Belle Beems - Coherence in EU Digital Regulation — Competition Law, the DMA and the GDPR

    In this episode, Anush and Kena sit down with Belle Beems, Assistant Professor of EU competition law at the Europa Institute, Leiden University. Belle's award winning PhD asked a deceptively simple question: Can the institutional frameworks and cooperation mechanisms behind competition law, the Digital Markets Act and the GDPR actually work together, or are we left with a patchwork of enforcers pulling in different directions when they regulate the same personal data markets. We discuss where the DMA and competition law framework hold up well and where they fall short, why the relationship between competition law and the GDPR is the most fragile of the three, and what her recent paper with Jasper van den Boom proposes for giving national competition authorities a bigger role in DMA enforcement over time. We also get into her research stays across Barcelona, Düsseldorf and Vienna, and what a joined up EU approach to digital regulation might look like going forward. Belle also shares some insights for current and future PhD researchers in the area during our conversation.

  3. Aug 17

    Episode 37- Eun Hye Kim - How Competition Law Really Changes: Empirical Legal Methods and Judicial Behaviour

    In this episode, Anush Ganesh and Ece Ban sit down with Dr Eun Hye Kim, Assistant Professor at the University of Leeds, whose research brings quantitative and empirical methods to the study of how competition law doctrine actually changes over time. Fresh off winning Best Paper at ASCOLA 2026 for her work applying the Rasch model to measure incremental change in case law, Eun Hye walks us through her journey from doctrinal EU law to hand-coding thousands of judgments, her doctoral research on the Advocate General's role in shaping EU competition law, and what large-scale databases like IUROPA reveal about the hidden dynamics of judicial decision-making. We talk about the pitfalls of empirical legal research, the underappreciated role of the Advocate General, and why competition law offers such fertile ground for studying how precedent really evolves.

  4. Aug 10

    Episode 36- Filippo Lancieri - Private Enforcement, Remedy Design, and the Political Economy of AI Regulation

    In this episode Anush and Kena sit down with Dr Filippo Lancieri, Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, a Research Fellow at the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a Fellow at the ETH Zurich Center for Law and Economics. Filippo's work moves between traditional legal analysis and causal empirical research to understand how governments shape markets and how markets in turn shape governments, with a particular focus on competition policy, technology regulation, and the political economy of market governance. Before entering academia he practiced antitrust and data privacy law in Brazil and the EU and advised governments on competition policy. We talk through his research on remedy design in digital markets, including the compounded error cost framework he has developed for matching the aggressiveness of a remedy to how confident authorities are about the harm it addresses, and where private enforcement fits alongside public authorities in actually delivering redress. We also explore the institutional divide between competition authorities and sector regulators, the risks of regulatory capture, and what lessons from decades of digital markets enforcement might carry over to the emerging and fragmented landscape of global AI regulation.

  5. Jul 14

    Episode 35- Sara Guidi and Linus Hoffmann - Interpretation of Competition Law and Remedies in the Digital Age

    In this episode, Anush Ganesh is joined by Sara Guidi, Lecturer in Competition Law at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and a PhD Candidate at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, and Dr Linus Hoffmann, Lecturer in Competition and Internet Law at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, who completed his PhD from EUI in 2025. Both have been supervised by Professor Nicolas Petit. We engage on Sara's current work which discusses how competition law actually changes by being cognitively open to external factors but operationally closed. Sara walks us through the four-stage model of legal evolution, running from an initial state, through an evolutionary challenge, into a phase of experimentation, and finally to stabilisation. We also touch upon her past work published in European Papers which argues that the DMA is really about controlling what gatekeepers can do with information, whether they can combine, withhold, rank, or display it in a particular way in light of whether competition law has shifted from regulating things to regulating information. We also discuss Linus' critical analysis of the split between structural and behavioural remedies under Reg. 1/2003. He argues that this split falls apart in digital markets and should be abandoned by using the duck-rabbit illusion. Linus discusses this argument in light of past cases such as Facebook/ Meta (Bundeskartellamt) and Google Shopping where the the same remedy can be seen as either structural or behavioural depending on how one looks at it. Linus also shares his proposed rewrite of Article 7(1) of Reg. 1/2003 suggesting a uniform notion of remedies that focuses on the forms of private control over valuable assets . The conversation also includes a lively discussion on simplification and complication of competition law to achieve the goals that are set out, and whether the age of the DMA requires viewing these concepts in a different light. The conversation provides cross-cutting insights for anyone keen to learn about how the interpretation of competition law concepts and remedies has evolved in the digital age.

  6. Jul 6

    Episode 34- Tim Cowen - From BT to Big Tech, a Candid Take on Competition Law Today

    In this episode, Anush Ganesh sits down with Tim Cowen, Chair of the Antitrust Practice at Preiskel and Co, for a wide ranging conversation shaped by his decades of experience across telecoms and technology regulation. We deep dive into Tim's time leading BT's competition and public policy team through the liberalisation of the EU telecoms market and use that grounding to explore how those lessons translate, or fail to translate, to his experience on digital markets today. Tim also draws on his direct experience working on the Microsoft and Google cases, offering a first hand perspective on some of the most significant enforcement actions in the sector's history. The conversation also brings in the US, and Tim discusses how politics has shaped the direction of US antitrust enforcement in recent years. He reflects on how this has, in turn, disrupted the trajectory of EU and UK competition law, and how little the US has done to support investment in the space. Alongside this, Tim discusses the remarkable growth of US tech platforms and what that growth says about the regulatory environment they have operated in. We also discuss the move from ex post to ex ante laws, where Tim pushes back on the framing itself, arguing that there is no such thing as a purely ex post or purely ex ante law. The conversation then moves to the CMA's approach to enforcement, where Tim is remarkably candid about what he sees as a hands off posture from the regulator and what that means for digital markets going forward. We also touch on the state of private enforcement in the UK and where AI is heading in competition debates. Listen here to one of the most candid views on the enforcement of competition law and digital regulations in the UK and EU.

  7. Jun 29

    Episode 33- Gunn Jiravuttipong - The Global Diffusion of Digital Platform Regulation

    In this episode, Anush Ganesh and Kena Zheng speak with Dr Gunn Jiravuttipong, who recently completed his JSD at UC Berkeley School of Law and is a Law and Development Researcher at the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI). Gunn's research traces how DMA-style platform regulation has spread across the EU, UK, Japan, Australia, India, Brazil and South Korea, and proposes a five-stage typology, reform announcement, expert report, draft legislation, public consultation and enforcement, to map this process. The conversation explores why some regulatory drafts, like Japan's Smartphone Act and the UK's DMCC, took a narrow, sector-specific path and moved quickly to enforcement, while broader multi-sector proposals in South Korea, India and Brazil stalled or were withdrawn after consultation. Gunn also discusses why public consultations on platform regulation have become internationalized, attracting as much foreign as domestic participation, and what the current geopolitical climate and the rise of AI policy mean for the next phase of diffusion. Drawing on his own practical experience at TDRI, Gunn closes by applying his typology to Thailand itself, weighing whether the country is more likely to follow Japan's targeted sectoral route or risk the broader, contested path that stalled elsewhere.

  8. Jun 22

    Episode 32- Justin Lindeboom - Formalism in Competition Law and the Draghi Moment

    In this episode , Anush Ganesh and Kena Zheng are joined by Dr. Justin Lindeboom, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Groningen, whose work sits at the crossroads of legal theory, EU constitutional law, and competition law. Educated at Groningen, UCL, and Harvard Law School (where he was a Fulbright Scholar), Justin is Deputy Editor-in-Chief of European Papers and an Associate Member of UCL's Centre for Law, Economics and Society. We dig into two of his papers- "Formalism in Competition Law" (Journal of Competition Law and Economics) and his dynamic-positivist reading of the Google Shopping judgment (Journal of European Competition Law and Practice) . We discuss what the Draghi Report means for the architecture of the internal market and competition rules. Along the way: why formalism is competition law's "scarecrow," what Frederick Schauer's distinction between rule-based and all-things-considered decision-making tells us about per se and by-object categories, why effects-based approaches may reproduce formalism rather than escape it, and how the DMA fits the picture. We close on the harder constitutional questions- discretion, the legitimacy of novel theories of harm under Article 102, Justin's "rullifiability" criterion, and whether norms like systemic coherence and procedural legitimacy genuinely constrain enforcement or merely redescribe the problem. A conversation for anyone interested in how EU competition law is reasoned, structured, and held to account.

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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 SCiDA team members: Dr Anush Ganesh (Leeds University), Dr Kena Zheng (HHU Düsseldorf) and Dr Jasper van den Boom (Leiden University). 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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