Thibault Schrepel

My rule for interactions on BlueSky (and elsewhere) is simple: I always assume it’s my interlocutor’s birthday. This means my messages are sent with kindness and compassion.

The #AIAct was meant to replace 27 national approaches with one. So I checked what the Member States did next. I found 62 national AI laws and bills since 2021... thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/one-ai-act...

TikTok’s best fact: 77 to 82% of its users also use Facebook or Instagram, so it locks nobody in. The Commission has accepted that kind of argument 19 times in merger cases. In court it has never changed an outcome. If the top court follows its adviser, it will not under the DMA either.

Under the Digital Markets Act, a company that hits three numbers is presumed to be a gatekeeper. To escape, it must show a “high degree of plausibility” that it is not. That phrase appears in one EU judgment out of 1,000+.... thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/the-dmas-f...

TikTok is fighting its label as a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Just last week, the Advocate General said TikTok should lose. His opinion cites 12 judgments. Not one is about competition law: thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/the-dmas-f...

In Bucharest for the LIDC Congress, speaking on AI and the law’s fixed categories. AI now helps build its own successor. Any box the law draws today describes yesterday’s model. Categories age, measurement updates. Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The DMA says steering is “free of charge”. The Commission read that to cover the sale that follows. Apple’s new terms charge 15% within 7 days of a link-out. The Commission welcomed them. More on this: thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/the-price-...

I spent a couple of days redesigning the Network Law Review. I hope you enjoy it, and above all that it gives every article the spotlight it deserves.

EU digital law says “free of charge” 161 times. In 125 of those rules, the text says nothing about the commissions, bundled fees or ancillary charges that may follow. The word “indirectly” appears once. What a free lunch obliges, in 34 laws: thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/the-price-...

Your city, your employer, your CEO’s pay and the next market crash obey one law. Xavier Gabaix spent his career working out why. Then I asked him about the cost of thinking. open.spotify.com/episode/4i5vnkQFdzBObKo1sx6wvf youtu.be/hksXBzu4AnU podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1736309658?i=1000791969279

I coded every rule in EU digital law that fixes what a firm may charge for data, access, a service or a procedure: 244 rules in 34 laws. 161 set the price at zero. Cost-based, “reasonable”, FRAND and capped prices share the rest. New empirical work thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/the-price-...

One digital single market. National definitions of small. In telecoms and payments, EU law lets each Member State set the threshold under which a firm counts as small. Same EU law, same firm, different regimes. thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/who-is-sma...

Two firms of 30 people. One independent, one owned by a large group. In EU digital law, the first gets 25 small-firm reliefs. The second keeps 3, loses 13, and 9 are unclear. Ownership matters as much as size. thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/who-is-sma...

Firm sizes follow the same power law across countries and decades. Authorities that try to redraw it fight a statistical law. Xavier Gabaix on what antitrust should learn: open.spotify.com/episode/4i5vnkQFdzBObKo1sx6wvf youtu.be/hksXBzu4AnU podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1736309658?i=1000791969279

The number of antitrust initiatives on generative AI has not grown (if you look at it yearly) since 2023. What changed is what they are. Investigations, charges and interim measures were 1 in 17 entries in 2023. They are 6 in 20 in 2026...! Same amount of output, harder edge.

Draghi says European firms “stay small”, partly because of rules that kick in at a certain size. I mapped all 290 size-based rules in the EU’s 34 digital laws. 20 of those laws use a size term they never define. thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/who-is-sma...

12 Sep: an essay asks the AI industry to slow down together. Same day: three rival CEOs agree. 18 Sep: paying users sue. 21 Sep: 22 gov leaders call for common standards. The timeline, and what EU competition law would make of it: thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/the-ai-slo...

My reading suggestions for September. What acquirers actually keep when they buy a startup, the causation element in monopolization cases, the economics of recursive self-improvement, why AI detection cannot work, and the university after AI. www.networklawreview.org/september-20....

24 EU judgments since 1980 weighed a public-interest plea for restricting competition. Since 2006, NOT ONE has saved an agreement between competitors. A pact to slow AI down for safety would be the first. The full record, step by step: thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/the-ai-slo...

Your city, your employer, your CEO’s pay and the next market crash obey one law. Xavier Gabaix spent his career working out why. Then I asked him about the cost of thinking. open.spotify.com/episode/4i5vnkQFdzBObKo1sx6wvf youtu.be/hksXBzu4AnU podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1736309658?i=1000791969279

“People of the same trade seldom meet together […] the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” Smith, 1776. This summer the frontier AI labs met, then asked Washington for an antitrust waiver. Would their pact survive EU law? My take: thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/the-ai-slo...

The Draghi report diagnosed regulatory burden and fragmentation as the reason European firms stay small. The European Innovation Act repeals no Union obligation, reduces none of the 27 enforcement environments, and amends exactly one instrument: the EU trade mark Regulation.

The question for AI is to what extend returns are increasing. A new paper by Tom Cunningham et al. puts a number on it. arxiv.org/abs/2609.15802 This has big implications for law. One does not regulate self-improved systems as others, see papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The three policies Bloom, Van Reenen and Williams rate highest for innovation: R&D tax credits, skilled immigration, trade and competition. The European Innovation Act is silent on the first two and works against the third. thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/european-i...

101 antitrust initiatives on generative AI by antitrust agencies, Feb 2023 to July 2026. ➝ 2023: United States 7, Europe 7. ➝ 2026 (ongoing): Europe 15, United States 1. Every enforcement action in the database since November 2025 is European.

The fastest change we have ever recorded. Two editions ago, no competition agency reported an internal LLM assistant. This year, 19 of 30 run or build one. From nothing to the most common tool in the field in two years. Fifth report, free. shorturl.at/wmEaW #computationalantitrust

Article 11 of the European Innovation Act would open R&D procurement only to firms of European origin. In 25 years of EU digital law, no instrument has ever excluded a firm for where it comes from. thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/european-i...

Five errors in the Commission’s Booking decision, most of the increment calculation thrown out, nothing annulled. Commission v Tetra Laval, the closest authority in the graph, never named. My audit of the Booking/eTraveli judgment, citation by citation, is out.

OUT: The only report on the use of AI in antitrust written by the agencies themselves. 30 of them this year, in their own words: which models they run, what they let them do, what they refuse to do... Here is the fifth edition of the Stanford #ComputationalAntitrust report shorturl.at/wmEaW

Booking/eTraveli is the first EU judgment where leveraging runs from a market a firm does not dominate into one it does. The Court called the direction irrelevant, in three paragraphs, no authority. Reverse leveraging is law: thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/booking-et...

A merger can now be blocked for a share gain of a few tenths of a per cent. Not because competition falls, but because it stays where it is. Two paragraphs, no citation, no precedent in ECJ judgments. Booking v Commission, dissected: thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/booking-et...

Para 58 of the new Article 102 Guidelines states a rule no judgment states. The likelier the harm, the less evidence needed -> the burden shifts to the firm. The Court has presumptions for two practices. Para 58 cites one and states the rule for all. thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/commission...

For two years I ran an experiment in my law classes: one group banned from ChatGPT, one left alone with it, one trained to use it. Structured training won year one. By year two, the edge had mostly gone. Now fully accessible in OA (Dutch Taverne amendment): papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Read the new Article 102 Guidelines and you will find the Court quoted correctly on every page. Read the judgments and you will find the next paragraph. That paragraph is where the Commission lost Intel, Qualcomm, AdSense and Android. thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/commission...

My op-ed in Les Echos on the Commission’s draft merger guidelines: www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats.... The question I ask is not whether the new rules are good. It is why a text that changes so much is written as if it changed nothing.

NEW: I checked the Commission's Article 102 Guidelines against the judgments. Faithful on 1,093 citations of 1,096. Silent on the paragraphs that follow, where the Court says what the Commission must still prove, and where it has lost before. thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/commission...

I like when AI is making data that I’ve had for a very long time. I find it useful. I’ve ranked over 2,000 movies on IMDb. Giving all the data to Claude, I was able to spot new movies that are missing to my watch list. How exciting is that?

The fastest-spreading clause in EU digital law conscripts a foreigner’s representative. 1 act had it in 2016. 12 do now. Full audit here: thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/where-eu-d...

Of the EU digital acts adopted between 2000 and 2015, none reached a firm with no establishment in the Union. Not one. Of the 19 adopted since 2020, 15 do. Find the full audit here: thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/where-eu-d...

NEW: The draft EU merger guidelines open by saying they are based on the case law of the Union Courts and the Commission’s decisional practice. Frédéric Jenny and I tested that sentence against all 8,450+ published merger decisions + all ECJ competition cases. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The Brussels effect is usually established from outcomes ➝ the foreign firms that end up following EU rules without being required to do so. I went to the texts instead and coded every scope provision of the 34 EU digital acts, the 273 rules that decide whether the rulebook applies to you at all.

Do yourself a favor, watch this. It’s UTMB (Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, 100 miles), live, and it’s extraordinary: www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1Xw....

2000 to 2015: the EU set no sanction prices in its digital rulebook and imposed none itself. 2020 to 2025: it sets 52% and imposes 27%. The sanctioning power is federalizing, generation by generation. No treaty change. No announcement. Just drafting. thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/paying-the...

141 of the 255 penalty provisions in the EU digital rulebook leave the price of infringement to Member States. The obligations are federal. The consequences are not. One rulebook, 27 price lists. Call it a single market... thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/paying-the...

NEW: The largest category of sanctions in the EU digital rulebook is not a fine. 1/3 of its 255 penalty provisions revoke capabilities, the authorization, the service, the managers. A fine has a ceiling. Losing the right to operate does not. thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/paying-the...

A law adopted between 2000 and 2015 called for 7 outside texts on average to complete the legislation. Between 2016 and 2019, 11. Since 2020, 20. Each generation ships less assembled than the last. thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/the-eu-rul...

I went through 34 EU digital laws (AI Act, DMA, DSA, MiCA, GDPR…) and counted every time the text says the actual rule will be written later, in a separate text. It happens 517 times: thecompetitionsystem.substack.com/p/the-eu-rul...