Making Sense of the Google Android Decision

Abstract

The European Commission’s Google Android decision will surely go down as one of the most important competition proceedings of the past decade. And yet, an in-depth reading of the 328 page decision should leave attentive readers with a bitter taste. The overall problem is simple: while the facts adduced by the Commission are arguably true, the normative implications it draws — and thus the bases for its action — are largely conjecture.

This paper argues that the Commission’s decision is undermined by unsubstantiated claims and non sequiturs, the upshot of which is that the Commission did not adequately establish that Google had a “dominant position” in an accurately defined market, or that it infringed competition and harmed consumers. The paper notably analyzes the Commission’s reasoning on interrelated questions of market definition, barriers to entry, dominance, theories of harm, and the economic evidence adduced to support the decision.

In short, the Commission failed to adequately prove that Google infringed European competition law. Its decision thus sets a bad precedent for future competition intervention in the digital sphere.