antitrust

Published on 06/11/2025 – 20:47 GMT+1
•Updated
20:56

The Commission launched on Thursday an investigation into a potential collusion between the two stock exchange groups, Deutsche Börse and Nasdaq, in the market for derivative financial products.

At the heart of EU antitrust enforcer’s concerns is the potential coordination of their conduct in the listing, trading, and clearing of those derivatives, which, if proven, would be in violation of EU’s competition rules.

EU law encourage competition between different economic operators to ensure that prices are set fairly by the market, free from any collusion or abuse of dominant position.

In September 2024, the Commission carried out unannounced inspections at the premises of both financial groups, as permitted under EU rules.

It targeted their practices around financial derivatives, which are contracts whose value changes depending on the price of another asset, such as stocks or commodities.

“Deutsche Börse and Nasdaq entities may have entered into agreements or concerted practices not to compete,” the Commission said in a statement, “in addition, the entities may have allocated demand, coordinated prices and exchanged commercially sensitive information.”

A deal made in 1999

Deutsche Börse and Nasdaq are among the world’s largest stock exchange groups.

According to EU competition commissioner Teresa Ribera, such behaviours could also affect “the proper functioning of the Capital Markets Union – a cornerstone for innovation, financial stability and growth.”

The completion of the European Capital Markets Union — a barrier-free market for capitals aimed at reducing their costs for listed companies and improve investment conditions — is one of the priorities of Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen.

If there was a collusion between Deutsche Börse and Nasdaq, it would constitute “an artificial barrier” on the EU market, Commission’s spokesperson Thomas Regnier told Euronews.

Deutsche Börse reacted in a statement saying : “We are engaging constructively with the European Commission.”

The stock exchange group explained that the Commission’s investigation concerned a 1999 deal, which Deutsche Börse considers “pro-competitive”.

“It aimed to build deeper liquidity in the respective Nordic derivatives markets and create efficiencies,” it argued, adding: “It provided clear benefits for market participants and was public.”

The 1999 deal was made between Deutsche Börse’s derivatives branch Eurex and the Helsinki Stock Exchange, which was acquired by Nasdaq in 2008, for the Nordic derivatives markets, it said.

Sept. 15 (UPI) — China said that Nvidia has violated its anti-trust laws in a 2020 acquisition of an Israeli company.

China’s State Administration for Market Regulation announced late last year that the company’s acquisition of Mellanox violates the country’s anti-trust laws. The SAMR approved the acquisition at the time, but now said Nvidia hasn’t followed some conditions of the agreement. It hasn’t said what conditions, though. SAMR said Monday that it will continue its investigation.

Nvidia shares dropped 2% on the news.

Negotiators from China and the United States are meeting in Madrid to discuss trade tensions between the two countries. Recently, the United States added 23 Chinese companies to a list of those blocked from buying U.S. technology because of security issues.

In July, China said it’s investigating American integrated circuit suppliers. The Cyberspace Administration of China, or CAC, demanded Nvidia explain “backdoor security risks” allegedly found in Nvidia’s H20 computing chips, and to submit documentation related to those risks that it said was revealed by American artificial intelligence experts.

Last week, the FCC announced the launch of the proceedings to revoke recognition of seven laboratories that review and approve electronics as accredited test laboratories for testing electronics for approval for the U.S. market, accusing them of posing a risk to national security. Many of them were based in China.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has lobbied for American companies to be allowed to sell to China. He said that if American firms aren’t in China, Chinese companies like Huawei will fill the void in the AI market, CNBC reported. Last month, Washington agreed, with a deal that Nvidia give 15% of revenue in that market to the U.S. government.

On Thursday, NASA said it’s barring Chinese nationals from using its “facilities, materials and networks to ensure the security of our work,” after Chinese workers contributing to research were locked out of their IT systems and prevented from attending in-person meetings on Sept. 5.

Published on
12/09/2025 – 11:22 GMT+2

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The European Commission on Friday accepted the concessions proposed by Microsoft concerning its Teams platform Teams to resolve an antitrust case it has been entangled in since July 2023.

To allay charges of abuse of dominance, Microsoft has proposed to offer customers its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 applications without Teams at a lower price than the suites including Teams and committed not to offering discount rates on Teams higher than those offered on suites without Teams.

It also offered interoperability to competitors with certain Microsoft products and proposed to allow customers to extract their Teams messaging data for use in competing solutions.

The case was opened in July 2023 following complaints from competing office platform Slack and in 2024 from Alfaview, accusing Microsoft of abusing its dominant position by bundling Teams with its Office and Microsoft 365 suites.

In June 2024, the Commission made a preliminary finding that the US tech giant was abusing its dominant position in the professional software market.

A year later, the Commission launched a market test on commitments offered by Microsoft which lead Slack and Alfaview to withdraw their complaints.

“Organisations big and small across Europe and around the world rely heavily on videoconferencing, chat and collaboration tools, especially since the coronavirus pandemic,” EU competition commissioner Teresa Ribera said in a statement, adding that the decision “opens up competition in this crucial market, and ensures that businesses can freely choose the communication and collaboration product that best suits their needs.”

The Commission’s decision makes Microsoft’s commitments binding for seven years and for 10 years regarding interoperability and data portability.

“We turn now to implementing these new obligations promptly and fully,” Nanna-Louise Linde, Vice President of Microsoft’s European Government Affairs, said in a statement.

If the company fails to meet its commitments, the Commission could impose a fine of up to 10% of its global annual revenue.

Sept. 6 (UPI) — A federal judge on Friday dismissed Newmax’s lawsuit accusing Fox News of maintaining a monopoly on conservative news broadcasting on cable television.

Newsmax on Wednesday accused the Fox Corp. and Fox News Network of violating the Sherman Act, Florida Antitrust Act and the Florida Deceptive Trade Practices Act by forcing cable services providers to feature Fox News and its less popular news outlets over Newsmax and other providers of conservative-oriented broadcast news.

U.S. District of Southern Florida Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the complaint without prejudice due to a “shotgun pleading” by Newsmax.

The most common type of shotgun pleading is one in which a complaint contains multiple counts that repeat the allegations of preceding counts, Cannon wrote.

Each successive count “adopts the allegations of all preceding counts, causing each successive count to carry all that came before and the last count to be a combination of the entire complaint,” Cannon wrote.

She said the court is obligated to dismiss shotgun pleadings and require the plaintiff to file an amended case for the matter to proceed in court.

Cannon gave Newsmax through Thursday to file an amended complaint, which “must not contain any successive counts that incorporate all prior allegations.”

She said counts one through five can include the same factual allegations without broadly incorporating the allegations of the prior counts.

“Each count must identify the particular legal basis for liability and contain specific factual allegations that support each cause of action within each count,” Cannon said.

If Newsmax does not file sufficiently amended pleadings by the end of the day on Thursday, Cannon said she might dismiss the case without further notice.

Newsmax called the dismissal a “technical matter” and plans to file an amended complaint, a representative told UPI.

“Newsmax cannot sue their way out of their own competitive failures in the marketplace to chase headlines simply because they can’t attract viewers,” Fox News Media told UPI on Thursday.

Sept. 5 (UPI) — The European Commission on Friday fined Google $3.455 billion for violating the European Union’s anti-competitive practices in advertising technology, prompting a threat by U.S. President Donald Trump to impose higher tariffs.

Earlier this week, a U.S. federal judge ordered the U.S.-headquartered company to hand over its search results and some data to rival companies. The Justice Department challenged Google’s dominance in online search. But Google avoided having to sell off its Chrome browser or Android operating system.

The DOJ also is suing Google in another advertising case with the trial set to start later this month.

Trump, in a post on Truth Social, said the fine is “effectively taking money that would otherwise go to American Investments and Jobs.

“We cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity and, if it does, I will be forced to start a Section 301 proceeding to nullify the unfair penalties being charged to these Taxpaying American Companies.”

In a follow-up post five minutes later, Trump said Google has paid in the past “13 Billion in false claims and charged for a total of $16.5 Billion.”

On July 27, Trump reached a deal with EU in July for a 15% levy on most imports from Europe. The European bloc agreed to purchase $750 billion worth of energy from the U.S., and invest $600 billion more in other areas.

The European Commission, which represents 27 nations, said it fined Google “for breaching EU antitrust rules by distorting competition in the advertising technology industry (‘adtech’). It did so by favoring its own online display advertising technology services to the detriment of competing providers of advertising technology services, advertisers and online publishers,” according to a news release.

Google has 60 days how it intends to “bring these self-preferencing practices to an end and to implement measures to cease its inherent conflicts of interest along the adtech supply chain.”

The commission noted that advertisers and publishers rely on digital tools for the placement of real-time ads not linked to a search query, such as banner ads in websites of newspapers.

The EC began investigating Google in 2021. Investigators found that since 2014 Google “abused such dominant positions in breach of Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.”

“Today’s decision shows that Google abused its dominant position in adtech harming publishers, advertisers and consumers,” Teresa Ribera, the European Commission’s top antitrust regulator, said in a statement. “Google must now come forward with a serious remedy to address its conflicts of interest, and if it fails to do so, we will not hesitate to impose strong remedies.

“Digital markets exist to serve people and must be grounded in trust and fairness. And when markets fail, public institutions must act to prevent dominant players from abusing their power. True freedom means a level playing field, where everyone competes on equal terms and citizens have a genuine right to choose.

Google plans to appeal.

“There’s nothing anticompetitive in providing services for ad buyers and sellers, and there are more alternatives to our services than ever before,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s global head of regulatory affairs, said in a statement to The New York Times.

A variety of businesses, small and large, advertise on Google’s search engine. Google’s automated system finds and indexes webpages. In 2024, Google began providing artificial intelligence summaries through AI Mode.

Google has an 89.93% woldwide market share of search engines with Microsoft Bing second at 3.95%, Russia’s Yandex third at 2.21% and Apollo Global Management’s Yahoo fourth at 1.48%, according to StatCounter.

Google processes approximately 16.4 billion searches per day.

In 2023, Google had $264.59 billion in ad revenue, mainly from search, according to Statista. The company’s total revenue was 305.63 billion.

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who developed a search algorithm called “BackRub” at Stanford University. In 2021, the ad revenue was 70 million.

The name Google is a misspelling of Googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Google’s parent company is Alphabet, which was formed in 2015 through restructuring. It is the world’s third-largest tech company in terms of revenue behind Amazon and Apple. Alphabet’s total revenue was $350 billion in 2024 with the market capitalization now $2.83 trillion.

In mid-day trading on Nasdaq, Alphabet’s stock was up $1.59 to $233.89.

Besides Chrome, Android and its search engine, other Google businesses include Google Cloud, Google Maps and Waze, Google Pixel, Next and YouTube.

Published on
19/06/2025 – 17:15 GMT+2

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US tech giants Apple and Meta will not face sanctions immediately for failure to meet obligations under the EU’s digital rulebook, an EU spokesperson told Euronews.

In April, the Commission fined Apple €500 million and Meta €200 million for non-compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and gave both companies 60 days to bring their practices in line with EU rules. That grace period ends on 26 June, after which they risk periodic penalty payments.

According to the spokesperson, financial penalties will not be applied automatically but only after the Commission conducts a preliminary analysis and shares its findings with the two tech giants as part of an ongoing exchange process.

Apple was fined €500 million for preventing developers from directing users to alternative offers or content outside its platform—an action deemed contrary to DMA rules.

Meta received a €200 million fine for its “pay or consent” model, which the Commission found problematic. The model forces users to either consent to the use of their personal data for targeted advertising or pay for an ad-free subscription—limiting user choice.

In response, Meta introduced a revised version of its personalised advertising model in November 2024, which uses less personal data. The Commission is still evaluating this system while continuing its discussions with the company.

Compared to past antitrust enforcement, the fines issued in April were relatively modest. Under former EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, tech giants were subject to more substantial penalties.

In April, EU officials explained that the lower fines reflected the short duration of the violations since the DMA implementation started in 2023 and the Commission’s current focus on achieving compliance rather than punishing breaches.

US digital services have been drawn into the trade war that has been escalating between the US and the EU since mid-March. In response to US tariffs, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has threatened to impose a tax on digital advertising revenues.

Meanwhile, a report by the US Trade Representative, published in early April, labelled EU digital regulations as a barrier to US exports.

The DMA is designed to prevent dominant digital platforms from abusing their market power. It aims to open up digital ecosystems controlled by Big Tech and ensure users enjoy real freedom of choice online.