The New Platform Regulations (NPRs), which include the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act and others, were crafted to foster fair and contestable digital markets. Each of the NPRs share a common feature: a precautionary error-cost framework which permits intervention to protect competition before harm occurs. This article examines how this precautionary approach to error costs allows the competition regime to pursue the value of democracy, alongside others. It identifies three mechanisms through which a precautionary conception of error costs, as adopted by the NPRs, can pursue democratic ideals: ensuring that powerful firms do not exist beyond regulatory control, shielding consumers from domination by platform monopolies through contestable markets that protect consumer choice, and reclaiming the role of ‘architecting’ markets from private actors as to reflect the public interest.

We ask can’t consumers choose which advertising network they would like to use with Google’s zero-priced online platforms? Our answer is that by integrating its advertising network into its popular online platforms, Google has foreclosed competition in the online advertising market by denying rival supply-side ad networks access to its customer base. We propose a remedy called marketised monetisation, which is complementary to the break-up proposed by the Commission. Marketised monetisation would introduce an interoperability layer between Google’s popular online services and third-party ad networks to make the online advertising market more contestable. The interoperability layer would allow consumers to choose which firm should monetise their usage of Google’s zero-priced products and services.

Democracy in Europe is under threat. Competition law, given its history and potential as a tool of anti-domination, is a natural fit to protect and revitalise democracy in Europe. Yet the protection of democracy is habitually said to fall outside the proper scope of competition enforcement. Spencer Cohen and I show how competition law can, through a recalibration of its error cost framework, be used to safeguard against economic domination in markets.

Measuring competition is a crucial endeavour in competition law. Structural metrics are a vital source of information about market competition; yet current measures suffer from several flaws and are less developed than those employed in other fields. This paper draws from the literature in theoretical ecology to propose novel metrics of market diversity. These metrics quantify the effective number of competitors in a market. Unlike existing metrics used in competition law and scholarship, they do so in a manner variably sensitive to the size of firms, and can take into account both intra-market product differentiation as well as inter-market variation such as between products, geographies and over time.

This paper asks whether, and how, the integration of generative AI powered features into large online platforms raises novel questions pertaining to abuse of dominance under Article 102 TFEU. It argues that adding such features can lead to dominant undertakings entering new markets, which could constitute an exclusionary abuse through tying or self-preferencing. Dominant undertakings can nevertheless integrate generative AI into online platforms while complying with competition law, such as by enabling interoperability with competing third party undertakings offering similar AI-powered services or enabling generative AI features only for a subset of use-cases which do not depart from competition on the merits. While competition authorities face difficult strategic decisions about which remedies to pursue in such cases, a simple injunctive remedy could be both pragmatic and effective in the first instance, although several other options are available.

The integration of generative AI into platforms across the internet has provided the Digital Markets Act with its first real test: does the regulation protect the fairness and contestability in the face of disruptive innovation? This article reviews the recent effectiveness of the DMA, and concludes that it does not. However, the drafters of the DMA foresaw such teething issues, and included a triennial review process in the form of Article 53 DMA. The first such review is currently ongoing. In that light, this article argues that, owing to the backwards looking nature of the DMA’s obligations, the regulation is currently best characterised as ex ante competition regulation in ex post clothing. Drawing inspiration from the EU’s regime of merger control, it proposes a procedural shift whereby gatekeepers would be obligated to notify the Commission of changes to their core platform services prior to their implementation, and for the Commission to have the power to request commitments in order for such changes to be implemented, or even to block them all together.

We highlight how narrowly framed “solutions” can lead to unintended consequences and policy incoherence when applied to open systems, and advocate for a rhetorical shift from “problems and solutions” to “challenges and responses.”