Episode 16- Zlatina Georgieva - Escaping Article 102: From Unicorn Defences to Marketised Monetisation

Hello, and welcome to the Cedar Podcast. It's a shaping competition in the digital age. This is also part of the SkiDar project. My name is Anushka Nation. I'm a postdoc research fellow with the SkiDar project based at the University of Exeter of the United Kingdom. I'm joined here with my colleague, Kanna Zing. Hi, everyone. I'm Kanna. I'm also a postdoc supporting for the SkiDar project and based in the Josedorf University in Germany. Thank you, Kanna. Today, we're joined by an excellent guest. We're joined by Dr. Slatina Georgiwa, assistant professor in competition, regulation and governance at Utrecht University in excellence. Slatina brings a truly interdisciplinary perspective to competition law, having trained in political science before completing a PhD in law at Telberg University in the Netherlands. With subsequent postdoctoral research experience at the Technical University of Munich exploring EU economic governance. She remains affiliated with both institutions as a research affiliate of the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology and an extra mural fellow at the Telberg Law and Economic Centre. Today, we'll be discussing two of her recent publications that tackle fundamental questions in EU competition law. The first one is co-authored with Gossier Kozak and published in the Journal of Competition Law and Economics. This paper examines the elusive nature of ex-honorations under Article 102TFU. The second paper is co-authored with Todd Davies and is published in the Utrecht Law Review. This paper proposes a novel remedy for Google's at-tech practices. Both papers demonstrate the kind of creative thinking needed to address persistent challenges in competition law enforcement. So, without further ado, welcome to this video podcast, Slatina. Thank you very much for having me, Anush and Kenna. It's a pleasure to be here. So, thanks again for the invitation. Thank you, Slatina. To start the conversation of Kenna has some questions for you. Hi, Slatina. Thank you very much for joining us. As Euro, we also have a warm-up question for you. So, we saw that your academic journey is quite distinctive. You started with a bachelor in political science and European studies in Bulgaria before moving into law in the Netherlands. And you have since worked across institutions in Germany and the Netherlands. How has this interdisciplinary and international background shaped the way you approach competition law research? Well, thank you for this most interesting question, Kenna. Well, thank you for having looked so deeply into my profile. Yes, indeed, I have an interdisciplinary background. And it's at the bachelor level, as you mentioned, I have a political science degree, but also I finished a bachelor degree in Dutch law here in the Netherlands subsequently, which actually makes you ask maybe a bit different questions when it comes to research. And I tend to go naturally beyond this dichotomy descriptive normative that is ingrained in the legal discipline, right? When you try to write a good scholarly contribution, you always scope the field descriptively and then take a normative angle from which to analyze its deficiencies and propose solutions. So this classical legal style paper is something that I learned to do, but naturally does not perfectly fit my profile because from the political science nature of my studies, I have this tendency to ask the why question more. So this cause and effect type questions, for instance, to ask about drivers of certain developments in the legal discipline or beyond. For instance, currently I'm working on a very drafty paper, which I didn't share for this podcast, but it is about the soft law power of the European Commission, which can I'm sure you also love as a topic. So I'm asking like, how can the Commission use soft law and how does it actually use soft law instrumentally as a driver of substantive change in certain policy domains like telecoms and energy regulation. So these kind of cause effect questions are questions that I like, drivers of institutional and policy change questions, have to say that you need to be careful there, however, when it comes to methodology. So you need to be quite rigorous. So the assumptions you make, the choice of techniques of research, need to be carefully calibrated. So for instance, for this paper I just mentioned on the soft law instrumentalization, I tend to work a lot with interviews and I have a lot of interviews piled up. So yeah, this is one of the things that is different. But I think more and more legal science also is adopting such methods. So there I find nice convergence and I think it's to my benefit at this type of political science slash legal background. Maybe to finish off another question that is important to political science and is more and more prominent now in law is the question of power. So basically who sits on the table and why that matters to what extent is the commission as a powerful actor influencing national policies and how does that happen. For instance, through soft laws, I mentioned. So yes, I think this is something common between the disciplines and you have this often in big tech discussions too, currently, right? As we see, you have the instrumentalization of the DMA happening currently, political pressures, also looming large on the other side of the Atlantic. So yeah, this question of power is also quite prominent in my research and is common to the legal aspect of it as well. That is really interesting, Slatina. Thank you for sharing your experience. So let's move on to one of your substantive papers. Let's talk about the true unicorns paper with Korsha Korsak. In this paper, you use the striking metaphor of unicorns to describe exonerations under article 102, what inspired this framing and what does it tell us about the state of abuse of dominance enforcement in the EU quite a general question. Yes, and I'm sure that you already, of course, can have your own view of the unicorns' status of article 102 defenses. Why did we call it a unicorn? Well, let me start from the beginning. For the guidance paper of 2009 of the European Commission, when we talk about exonerations, we have two types. One is objective necessity, and the other one is the efficiencies exonerations. And we found in our paper that especially the latter, the efficiency exonerations, is very rarely brought up by defendant undertakings in the first place. And this is something that previous scholars had already warned about. So we confirmed their findings as per 2024. Efficiency exonerations is almost never planned. But also, even if it is put forward as an exoneration, it is still a unicorn, so it almost never gets actually acknowledged by the court or accepted. So we were hoping to find, otherwise, we were hoping to find an acceptance of an efficiency exoneration by the court in one of the more recent cases that we examined, but alas, this was not the case. And we think, and this is what we're also arguing, the paper that the reason for this is likely that it is very difficult under the efficiency exonerations to satisfy this criterion of no elimination of competition, which is the fourth criterion out of the guidance paper of 2009. And why is this so? Because, of course, if you're a dominant undertaking by default, you already are eliminating competition on the set relevant market. So how can that last criterion be fulfilled? We are really not sure. And this is one of the things that we try to also suggest as a future policy change to the European Commission in its upcoming draft guidelines, maybe be really more explicit about what they mean about this criterion, no elimination of competition. And how can it be fulfilled in practice? Because we really don't see this happening in the case loan for a reason. Then the other part of the exonerations options, the objective necessity parts, this is something which we saw a more varied user. There, the picture is more kind of colorful, but I guess I will have the opportunity to talk about this with one of your later questions. So I'll leave the discussion of objective necessity for a bit later. Great. Thank you very much for that explanation, which helps us to understand more information regarding the backgrounds and your thoughts on the paper. And we also found that in your paper you distinguish between reviewers at the stage of the debate. Publishing a primary missing of use and justifications that apply afterwards Could you please explain why this two-step framework matters for dominance undertakings trying to defund their practices? Yes, that's indeed a very important part of the paper. So as I started already in the introduction to the podcast the it's Descriptive paper in the legal sense and it was really crucial for us to describe this two-stage nature of the article one or two Process and indeed the first stage is the prima facie Establishment of abuse stage after which we go to the Exonerations or justification stage and of course this has also implications for the burden of proof the legal burden of Proving the first stage is on the commission while it reverses at the second stage and the legal burden of proof there is on the Impugned undertaking So what is important here? So as I mentioned the rebuttal stage is The stage where abuse has not been established. We are working towards establishment of prima facie abuse But that's not yet said in stone and so the undertaking has the opportunity to convince the commission that its behavior falls out of the scope of article one or two all together Um, and this is important. So for instance Here we can think of the undertaking submitting an as efficient competitor test with results that question or challenge the results of the evidence submitted by the commission in the first place So say that the commission has already performed an as efficient competitor test in mounting its case against a said undertaking ex Then that undertaking can decide to counter this test So to use it As a rebuttal through submitting arrival as efficient competitor test on its own So procedurally this part of our paper is called the evidentiary dance where the two parties kind of fight off whose as efficient competitor test has more merit And it is a very important stage of the procedure because this is where the undertaking has the chance to show that its impugn behavior is not abusive in the first place Um, but then once we have a prima facie establishment of abuse. So say the commission's as it is prevails and um the undertaking doesn't manage to convince it of its own as efficient competitor assessment Then we go to the point where we have the justification second stage um, and because we have this prima facie of finding of abuse there It's a lot more difficult for the undertaking to plead against this um And to justify its behavior So the hurdle there is Heart and high also because the evidentiary proof the evidentiary burden shifts on the undertaking Hence a successful litigation strategy would be to actually front load the counter arguments to the arguments of the commission to the rebuttal stage stage one Where the success chances of the undertaking are higher once you switch to the second stage. So step two Those chances uh actually They are yeah are a lot lot lower so chances of success are reduced dramatically So that's why it's important to have this distinction between rebuttals and Justifications Thanks Latina um, so in the paper you describe how In the intel saga the code of justice made clear that while the commission is not required to carry out and if a As efficient competitor test to find an abuse and foreclosure Once it chooses to do so the test takes on significant procedure and substantive implications. So This intel saga features prominently in your analysis particularly regarding these procedure rights and economic analysis Could you describe to us? How has this case changed the evidentiary burden when the commission relies on tests like the as a vision competitor test? Yes, thank you so much for the very interesting question Anush If I have to be like super brisk in my answer, it would be in one sentence the evidentiary burden has become heavier Because we have a lot more to unpack within as efficient competitor test analysis It's a prime example of the more economic approach which is now seeping in To article one or two as well through the cases like intel send So serviced your electric national and others So it is indeed heavier and more complex to to satisfy the evidentiary burden And actually a fun fact the entire paper on the true unicorns Of defenses under article one or two started from a debate between Gauss-Shakuzak and myself as to whether the as efficient competitor tested intel is more of a substantive nature or more of a procedural nature So I was initially before having done the research of the view that the as efficient competitor test is more of a substantive test Which can show The for instance the innocence of the undertaking if it pleads it or vice versa if the commission uses it it can Build its theory of harm while Gauss-Shakuzak was saying well, no, no actually this can have also procedural implications the as efficient competitor test is also procedural test. So once we did the research I think Gauss-Shakuzak won in a way because indeed when we look at intel It was clearly mentioned that the usage of the as efficient competitor test by the commission as Part of its theory of harm has implications for both the general court, but also for the commission itself so the Courts said that because the commission had used the test in decision the GC was obliged to assess intals criticism to the commission's analysis in the appeal and also As you correctly mentioned annouche once the commission uses the test In its theory of harm establishment the undertaking concern must have been afforded opportunity During the administrative procedure to make known its views on the truth and relevance of the facts and circumstances So including on the as efficient competitor test. This is what the court said in intel So it creates also procedural obligation the usage of this test on the commission itself to hear the arguments of the undertaking And also on the GC to allow this discussion on appeal So the as efficient competitor test is both substantive and procedural. This is our conclusion And the more we go into digital markets and the more complex this assessment becomes The more that burdens the evidentiary requirements and so the evidentiary burden of proof becomes higher and more complex Just one follow-up question to that. Did you find that in cases subsequent to intel This theory was either backed up or did you find that there was something new that you were able to learn in some of the cases that you mentioned se and perhaps even Unilever and some of the more recent cases Yes, so at the point that we finished with the research the three cases that were outward indeed those three Elevers and and well the intel case and Yeah, we saw this formula repeated multiple times the formula that once the as efficient competitor test is being taken into account by the commission Then it needs to give the right to the undertaking to defend itself on the basis of Of these allegations So that's the formulation that was repeated multiple times over and over again in all three judgments we looked at But yeah, I don't know how it will develop further. I think it's a very good point and it should be followed Thank you very much the antenna that's a very great point actually I feel that when I did my PhD I also trying to examine whether or not the commission trying to use This easy test in each of its decision especially in digital markets So I found that actually I think at the beginning the commission do not want to limit it itself Has this kind of burden to use it in peer decision because as you mentioned This is like a economic analysis which is more complex and also heavier burden for the commission to prove the abuse of Dominance positions of the undertakings But finally, I think as you mentioned that in intel case the court of justice Make this kind of judgment to put this kind of obligations on the commission to follow its software law, especially this guidance paper to ask it to follow its software law. So now we see that more in more and more decisions and also in the judgments where this AC test has been followed a lot. So I also want to ask for your opinion regarding do you think that this test is necessary from a normative perspective? Do you think it's really matters when we're trying to prove whether or not there is a abuse practice and also anti-competitive effects from your perspective? Thanks, Kenna. Yeah, this is indeed a very very insightful question and the as efficient competitor tests such of course has become something a lot broader, right? We know that there are scholars saying well that tests is actually at the broadest possible level also principle. So you need to compare with other entities what other competitor could potentially enter the market and if no other competitor of this type exists then well clearly we have a problem. So in that sense the as efficient competitor test is a counterfactual it asks okay what if is there someone who can challenge and counterfactuals do have their place in competition law. I do think especially in the context of more economic kind of thinking they become more and more important. So the as efficient competitor test in that sense I do believe is something that has relevance more than ever today if we want to go into the direction of efficiency oriented more economic article 102. The question is do we really want to go there and I think this is what the commission now is struggling with, right? Are we going into the direction of more presumptions based article 102 which was the initial idea in the proposal for guidelines of 102 or are we going away from that into a more economics kind of assessment which the triptych of cases send unit lever into points two. Yes that's why I'm really looking forward to the guidelines and what the final signal would be that the commission will give but as far as I kind of see it now it seems that more economic reasoning and the AEC test as a pinnacle of that or the expression of that seems to have a bigger and bigger role to play in article 102. Also if you look at article 101 extend to which we're moving there as well to this more economic interpretation this has been the case already for years. Maybe this alignment that is happening now between the two domains of antitrust enforcement is not such a bad thing but of course that's a very controversial thing to say because there may author that thing think exactly the opposite. So yeah let's wait for what the commission will say and I'll look forward to commenting on that once the time comes. Great thank you very much for sharing your positions on this kind of debate and also we found that in your paper you noted the concept of objective necessity appears to be expanding particularly in digital market cases like Google Android and the super league judgments. Do you think course are moving towards accepting broader categories of justification and what might this may for the commission's draft guidelines in the future. Yes this is one of my favorite parts of the paper to be honest I really like this findings of objective necessity that we managed to derive from the from the case law and indeed I think one of the important kind of contributions this paper has is that objective necessity as a category appears to be expanding beyond its original definition which was really about the Hilti case which was about okay objective necessity is about safety and health considerations so really considerations of public nature now it seems that indeed in the digital case laws or Google Android but also Google shopping other concerns like commercial considerations and technical considerations coming to the picture under the objective necessity debate which is interesting because it opens up the possibilities to plead objective necessity on the substantive level and yeah it allows for more wiggle room by the impure undertaking so we still interpret these broader objective necessities like commercial considerations, technical considerations as having a relation to public policy or a public good because of course some technical advancements that you can push forward with your innovation will trickle down to society but they're not purely of a public nature that can also be a purely private gain so this evolution of objective necessity seems to be broadening also even towards the private sphere of the undertaking and not just the public domain interestingly enough if you look at the guidance paper of 2009 when they discuss objective necessity they say it only has to concern external to the undertaking considerations this is no longer the case also internal and broader considerations of public nature are relevant and why do we think this is happening probably because it's so very difficult to prove efficiencies I mean efficiencies as we started the conversation are really very difficult to plead so they're pled very infrequently and if ever they got pled they're never successful so it seems that the subjective necessity category seems to be opening up in order to accommodate for this deficiency under efficiencies of this rhymes even but yes this is where we're going with that discussion really interesting discussions Latina so to summarize for our listeners the paper has assessed the difficult task of escaping liability under Article 102 DFU the paper provides key insights regarding the AEC test as a vision compared to a test that the commission is not obliged to apply it but once it chooses to do so significant consequences follow the test becomes central to the case and the undertaking's criticisms must be probably examined the paper also emphasizes very keenly that the AEC test has a hybrid nature both procedural and substantive which is quite an interesting finding we urge our listeners to read the read the Latina and Gautier's paper to learn more but for now let's move on to the other paper that we wanted to discuss in this conversation with Todd Davis on Google ATTEC break up or break out we've had Todd previously on the podcast and he's also discussed parts of the paper so I think it's really nice it's really nice to have you as well on the schema podcast in this paper you argue that the commission's market definition in the Google ATTEC case is too narrow could you explain why you think an ecosystems approach is more appropriate and what harms might be missed by focusing solely on the display advertising market yes thank you I'm keen to talk about the joint paper we had with Todd Davis and yes the idea is totally his when it comes to marketized monetization and I'm sure he has already very eloquently elaborated on that but I'm happy to also talk about it to also ensure further reach of this brilliant scholar so yes when it comes to ecosystem approach versus the traditional approach which is more narrow market definition based yeah there are several aspects here let's start with one of the pitfalls of traditional competition law is that well we aim for as narrow possible market definition in order then to be able to more easily show dominance and subsequently its abuse which is something that obviously on digital markets is a practice that doesn't work and many scholars have already shown how to go beyond that limitation by using all kinds of new tools like anti-candy q-test etc so this is one aspect also another aspect of course is the aspect of two-sided markets and ATTEC markets on which the paper. is based are such two-sided markets and we of course want to make sure that those markets work efficiently and there are certain limitations like network effects we are all too well informed about this I'm not gonna go there but the European Commission in its ATTEC decision which is just being appealed by the way to the courts says well yeah we look at this two-sided ATTEC market and potentially we want to propose remedies of structural disbursement between the different the three parts in this case of the supply chain however we thought okay well yes great in principle if you have integrated market power over several parts of a supply chain yes it makes sense especially if it's a two-sided market to impose a structural remedy but here the problem goes beyond just the two-sided market it goes into the ecosystem of Google is not just its ATTEC it's also other services that are consumer facing and are zero price like Google YouTube service maps etc all the advertisers that users advertising that users see on those platforms is actually part of or fed in by the Google ATTEC system so there is a broader leveraging happening not only within the ATTEC system but also towards those other zero price services in the broader ecosystem of Google and hence the decision of the European Commission to start an investigation in ATTEC is very much welcome and its idea to potentially do structural measures is also wonderful but it is not enough you need to really look at the ecosystem because it's at the ecosystem level that consumers in the end are harmed so by structurally breaking up what you do is potentially helping competitors within the ATTEC supply chain but you're not helping users because they still are going to suffer from this constant feed in of the advertising model of Google into their other services that they use on a day-to-day basis like YouTube that's where we kind of plead for a more ecosystem not only market definition but also theory of harm but in order to do this unfortunately the European Commission has to reopen the decision with an expanded theory of harm and given that it just has been appealed on this more narrow market definition yeah it's not in the cards that this happens anytime soon I think super interesting because I feel that as you mentioned that we will come the Commission to really focus on the topic and issues of this kind of advertisement advertising provided by Google and I think most of us after learning for digital markets for three years we know that's how this get papers they use advertisements to make the biggest profits for themselves and now we see that's how you and told you're trying to provide more choices for users and to help this market to be like more like more competitive and more contestable I think which is very good and also I really like the remedy that's in your paper you propose which is the marketize the monetization which a lot consumers to choose which advertising network monetize their use of Google platforms could you please work us through how these would work in practice and why you think it drives competition concerns more effectively than a simple break up proposed by the Commission yes this is indeed the core of the paper and as I mentioned here the idea came from Todd already during his master studies he wrote his master's thesis on this as well actually before publishing the paper and maybe let's start from from the last part of your question which is about why do you think that consumer facing solution like market monetization can or marketize monetization can actually be a better solution than a break up well as I mentioned already the Commission's decision is very narrowly focused on the at-tech supply chain where you have the buyers the suppliers of advertising and of course the ad exchange and again if you break up for instance and you remove the selling side of the market from the ad exchange side of the market then you make life easier for potentially rival SSP so suppliers sellers of advertising but you do not necessarily make life easier for end users and so this very narrow breakup option that the Commission considers and that Google well in the end of the day hasn't yet implemented is not going to to help the end consumer and that's why Todd was thinking and I really was supporting him and how can we think of a consumer facing solution and that's how marketized monetization was born first we were calling it marketization then it's turned out that there's a similar term used in business economics so now the term is a marketized monetization and it is a simple idea essentially it says make people end users essentially pay for the service of advertising that they receive so users end users can choose a third-party SSP so selling side platform and the money that the user essentially should pay in order to be able to choose between those selling side platforms ultimately they do not pay who pays for that the SSP itself the chose an SSP once it gets chosen by the end user can pay for the specific service to the ad exchange so the user in the end of the day gets the choice but the feeling it has to transfer is actually covered by the SSP of its choice as a counterperformance to the very fact that the SSP was chosen in the first place so the user still gets a zero-price service but also gets a choice as to who monetizes their engagement on the market and this is something that we do not have currently because as I mentioned if you are on YouTube who monetizes you Google's ad exchange and there is no way that this changes while under our model that we propose we will be able as end users to really choose which selling side party is going to monetize our attention and our data and then we can get even differentiation and competition on specific parameters between those SSPs for instance more privacy more green etc and in this sense it is a solution that is a win-win both for the user it's a user-centric perspective but also for the competitive landscape more broadly because you not only has consumer welfare but also you enhance system-wide competition which is another well goal of competition law right we are also worried about the structure of competition not only about consumer welfare effects in our case both would be covered of course if you look at implementability of this proposal we get to some hurdles but I'm sure that we'll get to that in a moment or so I'm as you correctly Zlatina I think it's a perfect time to look at the implementation of this really interesting model I find this model quite fascinating this model of marketized monetization so I'd like to ask you how would this marketized monetization be implemented under article one or two TFU and also under the digital markets act which legal pathway do you think offers the most promising route for such an innovative remedy according to you yes that's indeed the million-dollar question if you would say because we look in the paper into those two trends article 102 and the DMA as separate ways in which marketized monetization can be implemented and yes I would say that the article 102 routes might be a more challenging route why because it's a rather lengthy route as we know the digital markets act was actually coined in the first place because of the fact that article 102 proceedings took north five years so in that sense we could use potentially some form of a tying theory of harm that could take those practices down and make sure that we use the marketized monetization remedy, but who knows how long such a time case could take and would take in practice. So actually my personal preference would be to tackle this under the Digital Markets Act. As we know this act is rather flexible and is due for review every three years, first review upcoming now in July this year. So in this is it's a more adaptable tool. And there we have several routes through which we could think of implementing marketized monetization. My favorite route under the DMA would be to actually use Article 57 or similar formulation. Article 57 is actually inspired by the Apple App Store practices where Apple was demanding that its payment services were used by its users but also in order to pay certain developers on the platform. And that article actually prohibits gatekeepers from requiring end users to use payment services of that gatekeeper in the context of services provided by the business users that use the platform of the gatekeeper. So it's about a payment solution, it's not about SSB advertising supply chain model but still we can get inspired from that type of provision and say okay under Article 57 or its extension. We can require we can see that end users paying for zero-priced SSB services via just Google's solution is a problem that contravenes Article 57. So in this case the commission would have to establish that monetization services such as ad networks full under the definition of a payment service under 57 which might be a tool order but again we don't have to per se use 57 but get inspired to potentially tweak it and read into it a solution of the sort that I just described. So yeah that would be one way to go about it. And of course as I mentioned the DMA is a rather flexible tool, it is possible to also expand its prohibitions terrain, potentially you can even draft a provision directly targeting Google's ad exchange and ad supply chain model. Not unthinkable but of course more difficult to implement than just relying on Article 57 with a more extensive interpretation beyond just payment services. Yeah I fully agree with you because we already see that's how the commission already designated some of the advertising services provided by GAC papers so we see that if there are like additional obligations imposed by by the revision of the DMA that could be a possibility to really tackle this question. And we also see that there could be some potential criticism of the marketization that it could introduce efficiencies or privacy concerns. So how do you respond to this kind of objections and what do you say and do you say any scenario? We are such a remedy might actually enhance consumer privacy compared to the Statues Core. Yes so the limitations part of the paper indeed is important as well beyond the brilliant solution that taught device though we did think of issues and indeed one of the issues would be inefficiencies because the moment that you move the model towards control by end users you have the problem of many hands and that could bring it kind of inefficiency concerns. But in the end of the day what we say is well the legal aspect of this entire discussion is about weighing alternatives and what is important in this case is it a consumer centric model or sacrificing to some extent on inefficiency or do we really want to focus on efficiency only antitrust and we see more and more that the latter point is no no longer tenable you want to move away from purely efficiency centric kind of thinking especially on digital markets where the harms are complex. So putting sacrificing to some extent efficiency by making a consumer centric marketization model is a trade-off but we are willing to make this trade-off also in light of the fact that consumers at least under a consumer law are seen as informed consumers so in principle they should be able to make those decisions of who monetizes them eloquently and informedly so that's kind of conception of consumer law also helps us of the informed consumer to argue okay it's not going to be that bad because consumers should be able to take care of at least that decision for instance consumers choose subscription for their mobile telephony every so many months or years why shouldn't they be able to make a decision about who supplies them advertising so in that sense yeah it's a trade-off and that trade-off in our view on a normative kind of level should be made in the favor of end users and to give them credit for their choices so also when it comes to the second part of your question which is about consumer privacy I think that there is a case to make about privacy being enhanced and I'll get back to what we discussed previously if you make the system based on market-based monetization then different SSPs are going to compete for the user's attention the user is going to choose between different providers depending on their own preference for instance more green provider or a more consumer privacy sensitive provider and you have in that sense less agglomeration of user data into one single provider which in this case in current day terms is Google so by dispersing the data processed by different consumers to different SSPs you get less agglomeration of data and hence less information or privacy harms I would say so in that sense one you can talk about killing yeah one two birds with one stone because you solve the privacy harm on one side and you also allow for a more consumer centric view of antitrust on digital markets as well of course some people will say yeah behavioral economics as showed that consumers cannot really make logical decisions yes this is a big criticism we are aware of but then again it's a matter of normative weighing and we go for the consumer as antitrust the consumer as an ultimate decision maker here thanks Latina one bonus substantive question given that you mentioned that the DMA is under review and we'll see a newer version this year I wanted to ask you a question on your forthcoming paper with Karsha Kozak title co-hearing article one of two defenses and DMA offenses through the common code of the internal market could you take us through what you seek to argue in this paper and give us a very brief overview of what we will see in the future yeah thanks for for this wonderful question also opening up to future research so maybe to go back to the very first question what law does is the descriptive versus normative divide when it comes to research and this is exactly what we decided to do with Karsha Kozak a two-parter the first part is a true unicorns paper the descriptive one and then the second paper we're working on now is more than normative one where we ask the question of coherence we start from this normative perspective co-hearing in the realm of EU economic law and specifically co-hearing between the digital market act and article one or two in the realm of well exonerations and we know that it's important to co-hearing these domains because we have investigations of digital giants under one or two for sure as well but the DMA does not in itself provide for any exonerations it's is explicitly when it comes to efficiencies, that defense is not going to be taken into account, it doesn't have relevance for the gatekeeper designation, etc. And this is a point that has been challenged by other scholars, and we kind of also badwagon on this question of, okay, given that this idea has been challenged, and now we are before a revision, wouldn't it be kind of good to open up the debate again and see how we can actually cohere Article 102 exonerations and potentially introduce some form of limited truncated DMA justification in order to make the system more kind of well aligned. And then we start from the premise that both the DMA and their article 114 it's been adopted under Article 114, and the competition law domain have a common core in the internal market, right? So we look at how internal market defenses are structured, what kind of options are available there, what are the limitations, and how can we try to derive this common internal market logic on defenses to help us with the debate of cohearing 102 and the DMA. It's still a very drafty paper, which I've sent you, and I'll be happy also to yeah, continue the discussion on a further occasion, but this is the gist of the idea. How can we use internal market exonerations logic, which is the so-called mandatory requirements logic in the context of 102 and the digital market act to kind of cohere the system at a fundamental level. Excellent. Any final thoughts or questions from your cana? No, actually I just want to say thank you very much to Salantina, and also look forward to your new paper. Thank you so much Latina for joining us today. It's been a tremendous conversation. We've learned a lot as I expect would have our listeners as well. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much to both of you for the very thought-provoking questions as well, and for the kind invitation. It was a true pleasure to hear your questions, your very dynamic follow-ups, and maybe the only thing I would like to say as a closing to this wonderful podcast is that well we live in this brave new digital world where the status quo is changing continuously, and we need to then think innovatively but also boldly, and it is difficult to achieve this boldness under article 102 currently when the courts are bound by their president, but a potential brave new avenue could come through the TMA. So let's see what its promise of adaptability and flexibility is going to bring us in July, and also very much looking forward to the draft guidelines on 102. And finally, and of course last but not least, looking forward to all your future podcasts because they are very inspiring and I listen to them with much pleasure and joy. Thank you.