Recent regulatory reforms in Turkey aim to address the competitive risks posed by dominant digital platforms, particularly concerning data exploitation, self-preferencing, and discriminatory conduct. Rather than introducing a standalone competition law instrument, Turkey amended its Law on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce to embed competition-related obligations, raising questions about the consistency and coherence of enforcement. This article analyses the legal and institutional implications of these amendments, critically comparing Turkey’s approach with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). It argues that while the Turkish amendments reflect global regulatory trends, the lack of a dedicated competition framework risks creating enforcement conflicts between the Turkish Competition Authority and the Ministry of Trade, generating legal uncertainty. The study ultimately contends that Turkey should consider adopting a dedicated digital competition regulation, aligned with international best practices, to ensure effective oversight of digital platforms and maintain competitive neutrality in its evolving digital markets.

Ukraine’s European integration requires the alignment of its State aid control framework with EU competition law. The full-scale invasion by Russia in 2022 significantly disrupted this alignment, prompting Ukraine to temporarily suspend standard State aid oversight procedures under martial law. In response, Ukraine has undertaken comprehensive legislative reforms, including the adoption of sector-specific State aid criteria, enhanced administrative accountability measures, and systematic inventorying of existing aid schemes. This article analyses these developments, demonstrating Ukraine’s ongoing commitment to restore regulatory certainty, transparency, and competitive neutrality, despite wartime constraints. Judicial practices incorporating EU-derived standards, particularly the Altmark criteria, highlight Ukraine’s substantial progress towards Europeanisation, reflecting a strategic balance between emergency flexibility and adherence to EU competition norms.

This case comment examines a landmark decision by the Georgian Competition and Consumer Agency (hereinafter, “GCCA”; “the Agency”) concerning coordinated pricing among major pharmaceutical distributors in Georgia’s state-funded oncology medication program. The GCCA found that four leading companies – Aversi Pharma, PSP, Gepha, and Mermisi – repeatedly submitted identical price offers in a closed procurement portal, in violation of Article 7 of the Georgian Law on Competition, which prohibits restrictive agreements. The agency’s findings were based on indirect economic evidence, including the statistical improbability of such pricing alignment across 88 instances, ultimately leading to fines exceeding 53 million GEL. The case is significant not only for its legal conclusions but also for its timing. Issued shortly after Georgia was granted EU candidate status in December 2023, the decision can be interpreted as part of a broader effort to respond to EU criticism of Georgia’s underdeveloped competition enforcement. The ruling was subsequently recognized by the World Bank Group and the International Competition Network as an international best practice in promoting consumer welfare and competition. By analyzing the legal, economic, and policy dimensions of the case, this article argues that the decision represents a cautious yet promising step toward more effective oversight in Georgia’s pharmaceutical sector – a market historically characterized by high prices, limited competition, and regulatory inertia. At the same time, the case reveals persistent challenges in evidence gathering, judicial resilience, and institutional independence. The comment concludes that while the case signals growing enforcement maturity, lasting reform will require sustained regulatory vigilance, greater agency autonomy, and continued convergence with EU competition standards.

This paper examines how the concept of abuse of dominant position can be applied to the labour markets, where demand-side concentration and supply-side fragmentation generate monopsonistic dynamics that suppress wages, limit mobility, and reduce job security. It argues that traditional antitrust tools can be adapted to labour-specific contexts by redefining market boundaries through commuting zones, occupational substitutability, and recognition of artificial fragmentation. The study also addresses how exploitative practices such as non-compete agreements illustrate the concrete impact of employer power, and it highlights the need for a more coherent regulatory approach. Ultimately, it suggests that competition law, when enforced alongside labour law, can play a critical role in safeguarding fairer and more competitive labour markets.

In Beck’s current risk society, the State is faced with a dilemma. To fail before the risk but to keep the sphere of citizens’ rights intact; or not to fail but to restrict fundamental rights? This payoff turns out to be the main issue that juridical reflections on the use of predictive technology tools in the public sector must consider. Policing is an administrative function that is mainly composed of acts of a preventive nature. By using ICT, it is possible to employ AI systems with a very high rate of certainty to ‘predict’ future crime scene. But is it possible to combine the use of such predictive systems with the protection of fundamental rights? The paper will attempt to answer this question by reconstructing the legal framework, investigating whether it is possible to use these tools enjoying their positive effects and reducing the risk of violating fundamental rights.

This paper examines the European Commission’s Draft Guidelines on Article 102 TFEU, focusing on their treatment of collective dominance in oligopolistic markets. While the Guidelines adopt a structured framework derived from merger control, they fail to address a key challenge specific to Article 102: the need for clear evidentiary standards in retrospective enforcement. The paper argues that parallel conduct by independent firms can, in certain cases, serve as evidence of collective dominance where such behaviour is not rational absent joint market power. However, the Draft Guidelines offer little guidance on how to integrate such conduct into the dominance analysis. This gap risks leaving the collective dominance conceptually recognised but practically underenforced, thereby limiting the EU’s ability to tackle anticompetitive outcomes in concentrated markets.

As society advances toward a digital economy with increasing dependence on internet-based services, data has attained prominence as an essential currency supporting market power. This paper examines the emerging jurisprudence on excessive data collection by dominant digital platforms, comparing approaches developed in India and the European Union. The Indian approach, exemplified by the WhatsApp Privacy (2025) decision, integrates competition law with constitutional protections, particularly the right to privacy under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. Meanwhile, the European approach, crystallized in the Facebook Germany case, integrates competition law with data protection principles enshrined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Despite their different legal foundations, these approaches display convergence in recognizing that dominant platforms' data collection practices can constitute abusive exploitation of market power. This paper argues that this convergence creates opportunities for a unified analytical framework that respects jurisdictional diversity while enabling more effective global platform regulation.

The intricacies of unfair commercial practices within the e-commerce platforms market highlight a critical and urgent necessity for an evolution in both consumer protection and competition laws. As new consumer vulnerabilities emerge or existing ones are exacerbated in e-commerce, effective rules are needed to better protect consumers, govern businesses and regulate a healthy competitive dynamic in the market. This article examines the interplay between consumer protection law and competition law in addressing unfair commercial practices of e-commerce platforms. The large-scale deployment of unfair commercial practices by e-commerce platforms may result in anti-competitive effects, thereby undermining fair and effective market competition. Yet, in the ASEAN region, unfair commercial practices often fall under consumer protection law rather than competition law. A lack of synergy between consumer protection law and competition law undermines the regulatory efforts in promoting fair market practices. This paper employs qualitative content analysis with comparative analysis of the ASEAN countries’ competition law development, highlighting the importance of regulating unfair commercial practices in preventing anti-competitive effects and promoting fair market competition in the e-commerce platforms market.

Although thousands of reported cases involve allegations of firms illegally forming cartels in product markets, relatively few deal with similar allegations in labor markets. Moreover, as observed in legal doctrine, labor markets tend to be more concentrated than product markets and, consequently, more susceptible to anticompetitive conducts by undertakings. The article, therefore, analyzes the so-called monopsony power in the labor market, which refers to any case where employers hold labor market power that allows them to unilaterally determine wages or to worsen working conditions by reducing employment. It is argued that competition law should be used to effectively curb abuse of monopsony in labor markets, which should be policed just as it polices product markets. Applying competition law to labor markets can offer an effective tool to restraint monopsony power without substantially amending existing labor and employment law. However, other potential legal remedies and sanctions applicable to monopsony collusion are also considered, with particular attention to the disgorgement of profits.

Concerns related to Big Techs have led to a proliferation of legislative initiatives to complete competition rules with regulatory devices that would lead gatekeepers to be subject to obligations to preserve an equality of opportunities on the market. Within this context, this contribution revisits American decision-making practice from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century to show how regulatory-type interventions and the enforcement of competition rules have been activated to control the strategies of firms acting as gatekeepers. What we can learn from this experience is that a big firm having private regulatory power carrying out an activity affecting the public interest could and should be subject to specific supervision.