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Duty to Treat Downstream Rivals Equally: (Merely) a Natural Remedy to Google’s Monopoly Leveraging Abuse

By  |  September 23, 2017

Posted by Social Science Research Network

Duty to Treat Downstream Rivals Equally: (Merely) a Natural Remedy to Google’s Monopoly Leveraging Abuse

By Thomas Hoppner (Technical University Wildau)

Abstract:    Google has argued that, in its comparison shopping decision, the European Commission created a novel rule that a dominant company may not favour its own services. Such a rule, it is claimed, would only be justified where the company provided an ‘indispensable service’ as defined in the narrow case law on refusals to deal. This argument, however, confuses the identified abuse with the imposed remedy. The Commission imposed the obligation, to treat rival services like its own services, as a remedy. This remedy does not address a corresponding abusive discrimination or refusal to deal, but effectively brings a monopoly leveraging to an end. Google’s self-promotion is abusive only because it also fulfills long-established criteria for an anti-competitive extension of dominance from a primary market to a distinct, but related, secondary market. An ‘indispensable service’ is not required for this type of abuse.

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