Becket McGrath quoted in GCR “Epic Games files new claims against Apple and Google in UK”

The UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal yesterday published Epic’s separate claims against Apple and Google, which accuse the companies of abusing their dominance in the markets for distributing apps and processing in-app payments in their respective app stores.

Becket McGrath, a partner at Euclid Law in London, said substantive differences in UK, US and Australian law mean it is “perfectly conceivable” that Epic could have a successful abuse of dominance claim in the UK and an unsuccessful monopolisation claim in the US, or indeed vice versa.

Most of the ongoing discussions around digital markets and competition law concern the balance between regulation – such as the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act or the introduction of the UK’s digital markets unit â€“ and public competition enforcement by authorities, he said.

“While that is very important, this is a good reminder that there is the private litigation aspect of it too”, which on this occasion involves an aggrieved and well-resourced claimant and a system that welcomes these types of claims, McGrath said

To read the full GCR article: https://globalcompetitionreview.com/digital-markets/epic-games-files-new-claims-against-apple-and-google-in-uk

The Android choice screen

Has google “ducked” the EU remedy?

a CLI article by Oliver Bretz and Marie Leppard

In 2018, the European Commission found that Google abused its dominant position by imposing various restrictions on the Android operating system in order to entrench and promote its own search engine. In short, Google’s practices had denied rival search engines the possibility to compete on merits. The tying practices ensured the pre-installation of Google’s search engine and browser on practically all Google Android devices, and the exclusivity payments strongly reduced the incentive to pre-install competing search engines. Google had also obstructed the development of Android forks, which could have provided a platform for rival search engines to gain traffic.

To read the rest of this article please follow the link to CLI (Competition Law Insights)

Sarah Long to speak on digital markets panel at the Competition Section Annual Conference 2019

Sarah Long will join the panel on competition and digital markets at the Competition Section Annual Conference held at the Law Society on 9 May 2019, where she will be discussing antitrust enforcement and the use of interim measures in digital markets. Sarah advised the complainant BidOnThis in the Auction Services case, which is to date the CMA’s only abuse of dominance case in digital markets, and the only case in which the CMA has considered interim measures. A link to an article on the case, co-written with Simon Chisholm from CRA and Helen Parker from BidonThis, and published in the International In-house Counsel Journal is available here.