Shaping Competition in the Digital Age (SCiDA)

Episode 34- Tim Cowen - From BT to Big Tech, a Candid Take on Competition Law Today

In this episode, Anush Ganesh sits down with Tim Cowen, Chair of the Antitrust Practice at Preiskel and Co, for a wide ranging conversation shaped by his decades of experience across telecoms and technology regulation. We deep dive into Tim's time leading BT's competition and public policy team through the liberalisation of the EU telecoms market and use that grounding to explore how those lessons translate, or fail to translate, to his experience on digital markets today. Tim also draws on his direct experience working on the Microsoft and Google cases, offering a first hand perspective on some of the most significant enforcement actions in the sector's history. The conversation also brings in the US, and Tim discusses how politics has shaped the direction of US antitrust enforcement in recent years. He reflects on how this has, in turn, disrupted the trajectory of EU and UK competition law, and how little the US has done to support investment in the space. Alongside this, Tim discusses the remarkable growth of US tech platforms and what that growth says about the regulatory environment they have operated in. We also discuss the move from ex post to ex ante laws, where Tim pushes back on the framing itself, arguing that there is no such thing as a purely ex post or purely ex ante law. The conversation then moves to the CMA's approach to enforcement, where Tim is remarkably candid about what he sees as a hands off posture from the regulator and what that means for digital markets going forward. We also touch on the state of private enforcement in the UK and where AI is heading in competition debates. Listen here to one of the most candid views on the enforcement of competition law and digital regulations in the UK and EU.

Episode 33- Gunn Jiravuttipong - The Global Diffusion of Digital Platform Regulation

In this episode, Anush Ganesh and Kena Zheng speak with Dr Gunn Jiravuttipong, who recently completed his JSD at UC Berkeley School of Law and is a Law and Development Researcher at the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI). Gunn's research traces how DMA-style platform regulation has spread across the EU, UK, Japan, Australia, India, Brazil and South Korea, and proposes a five-stage typology, reform announcement, expert report, draft legislation, public consultation and enforcement, to map this process. The conversation explores why some regulatory drafts, like Japan's Smartphone Act and the UK's DMCC, took a narrow, sector-specific path and moved quickly to enforcement, while broader multi-sector proposals in South Korea, India and Brazil stalled or were withdrawn after consultation. Gunn also discusses why public consultations on platform regulation have become internationalized, attracting as much foreign as domestic participation, and what the current geopolitical climate and the rise of AI policy mean for the next phase of diffusion. Drawing on his own practical experience at TDRI, Gunn closes by applying his typology to Thailand itself, weighing whether the country is more likely to follow Japan's targeted sectoral route or risk the broader, contested path that stalled elsewhere.

Episode 32- Justin Lindeboom - Formalism in Competition Law and the Draghi Moment

In this episode , Anush Ganesh and Kena Zheng are joined by Dr. Justin Lindeboom, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Groningen, whose work sits at the crossroads of legal theory, EU constitutional law, and competition law. Educated at Groningen, UCL, and Harvard Law School (where he was a Fulbright Scholar), Justin is Deputy Editor-in-Chief of European Papers and an Associate Member of UCL's Centre for Law, Economics and Society. We dig into two of his papers- "Formalism in Competition Law" (Journal of Competition Law and Economics) and his dynamic-positivist reading of the Google Shopping judgment (Journal of European Competition Law and Practice) . We discuss what the Draghi Report means for the architecture of the internal market and competition rules. Along the way: why formalism is competition law's "scarecrow," what Frederick Schauer's distinction between rule-based and all-things-considered decision-making tells us about per se and by-object categories, why effects-based approaches may reproduce formalism rather than escape it, and how the DMA fits the picture. We close on the harder constitutional questions- discretion, the legitimacy of novel theories of harm under Article 102, Justin's "rullifiability" criterion, and whether norms like systemic coherence and procedural legitimacy genuinely constrain enforcement or merely redescribe the problem. A conversation for anyone interested in how EU competition law is reasoned, structured, and held to account.

Episode 31- Anna Tzanaki - The Future of EU Merger Control and the DMA's Institutional Design

In this episode, Anush Ganesh and Jasper van den Boom speak with Dr Anna Tzanaki, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Leeds and Affiliate Fellow of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Anna's research sits at the intersection of merger control, digital markets regulation, and institutional design across the EU, US, and UK. We discuss three of her recent pieces. First, her Antitrust Law Journal article on killer acquisitions and EU merger control, which examines why the Court of Justice rejected the Commission's repurposing of Article 22 in Illumina/Grail and what that judgment reveals about the constitutional limits of Commission discretion. Second, her JECLAP article co-authored with Julian Nowag, which maps the DMA's institutional architecture onto a compliance-enforcement continuum and interrogates the virtues of its procedural flexibility in counterbalancing the fixed nature of its substantive obligations on designated gatekeepers. Third, her ProMarket piece responding to the Commission's draft EU Merger Guidelines, which she characterises as "Schrödinger's cat" -- full of possibilities but short on certainties. Across the conversations, Anna posits for a more balanced view that takes into account context and institutional complementarities to alleviate tensions between institutional flexibility and the demands of legal certainty, principled constraint, and democratic accountability. Whether the current direction of EU competition law is getting that balance right is the question we put to Anna at the close of the episode.

Episode 30- Michal Gal - The Limits of Competition Law: Lessons for the future

In this episode, recorded in person at the SCiDA Conference 2026, Anush Ganesh sits down with Professor Michal Gal, Professor of Law at the University of Haifa and one of the world's foremost competition law scholars, as well as ASCOLA President between 2016 and 2023, to discuss her decades of research on competition law, algorithms, and digital markets. They explore how the "winner takes all" dynamic has evolved, drawing on her most recent work on the topic with Raz Agranat, before turning to her co-authored research with Jorge Padilla on how algorithms reshape competition enforcement. Michal then reflects on her influential work with Dan Rubinfeld and Oshrit Aviv on zero-price markets and the most pressing concerns in data markets today. The conversation revisits her prescient article on algorithmic consumers, which she described at the SCiDA Conference 2026 as more relevant than ever, before closing by asking whether radical restorative remedies have a role in the current enforcement landscape, with reference to her paper co-authored with Nicholas Petit.