Abstract
Big Tech, commonly associated with the firms Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM), makes up the most valuable companies worldwide in 2020. In the ten years leading up to 2020, these five companies alone acquired more than 400 firms, predominantly in the technological sector.1 However, most of these transactions were not scrutinised by competition authorities as they did not reach the traditional turnover thresholds, whereas those reviewed were not blocked following current merger control procedures. Prominent examples include the Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Facebook/WhatsApp, and Microsoft/GitHub mergers. As a result, a number of policy reports voice their concerns about the competitive effects of such acquisitions that target potential competitors but fly under the radar because of the features and challenges of the digital economy.2 In particular, firms in the digital economy often start to monetise only once they have acquired a large user base, thus not meeting current...
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