From big tech the new threats to consumers
Since Bersani’s themes, however, many things have changed, new processes have been activated and new subjects have established themselves on the market, opening up new challenges for the protection of competition and consumers. «Let’s think first of all of the digital revolution and the emergence of new monopolists with unprecedented appearances, the so-called big tech, which, alongside the extraordinary innovations, have also brought the concrete risk that they will then use their market power to prevent others from innovating or to exploit the consumer. We need to ask ourselves which competition policy is most suitable for facing the monopolistic growth of large digital operators, which paradigm it should embrace, which is the most effective response of the public authorities to face such concentrations of power».
Here is the greatest distance between the two sides of the Atlantic. «The US legal system – explains the jurist of the Antitrust Authority – has sacrificed a lot of pluralism in terms of efficiency, while the European Union has never lost sight of the value of pluralism and has set itself the problem of contrasting abusers of the large digital operators. The numerous investigations conducted by the European Commission and by national authorities in recent years are the clearest proof of this. At this point the problem is alive and well known that the European Union has decided to intervene, adding to the antitrust action, which intervenes ex post on behaviors restrictive of competition, the regulatory response from before: with the approval of the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act in 2022, the regulatory path was chosen to harness the enormous market power of the large digital platforms and prevent their pathological degeneration to protect fair and contestable markets and to protect fundamental rights of users”.
State aid regulations and the Alitalia case
The protection of competition also goes hand in hand with the rules on state aid. Sometimes it can be difficult to understand why a company in difficulty, which risks leaving thousands of workers at home, cannot be helped with public money. A case for all, Alitalia.
«The prohibition of state aid serves to ensure that free competition in the single market is not distorted and distorted by Member States’ financial assistance policies in favor of companies chosen at the discretion of politics. It is not an absolute prohibition since the Treaty, if on the one hand prohibits, as incompatible with the internal market, selective public aid which favors certain companies or productions and distorts or threatens to distort competition, on the other hand allows them in certain cases specific, by providing, for example, that State aid intended to remedy a serious disturbance in the economy of a Member State, or aid to companies in difficulty, aid where certain conditions are met, may be considered compatible”. .
Therefore, the discipline on state aids has margins of flexibility. But the basic principle “should remain that by which it is free competition which, by pushing companies to a constant competitive confrontation on the goods and services offered, triggers and feeds a virtuous process of innovation, progress and efficiency, from which for the entire community. On the contrary, it must not be forgotten that if and when State aid for rescue or restructuring makes it possible to keep companies in difficulty afloat, this generally happens at the expense of their competitors and this must be kept in mind in the balancing of interests underlying the public intervention”.