Defne Halil (Maastricht University – Faculty of Law) & Konrad Kollnig (Maastricht University) have posted Big is Not Bad, but Big AI Might Be: EU Merger Law and the Future of AI Competition on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The growing dominance of a few firms in AI increases competition concerns in the EU, as US-based tech firms, specifically Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and Apple (“Big AI”) control critical layers of the AI stack ranging from hardware to applications. Looking at 71 notable AI startup acquisitions by Big AI from 1989 to 2024, we find that, in the past, they largely escaped the EU Merger Regulation scrutiny; most transactions fell below turnover thresholds leaving potential anti-competitive effects unexamined. The CJEU’s 2024 Illumina/Grail judgment further restricts the European Commission’s ability to review non-notifiable mergers, reinforcing the status quo of consolidation by Big AI, and relying instead on member state law—which we analyse across all 27 EU member states. A Targeted Approach under Article 14 of the EU’s Digital Markets Act is proposed to create a special regime for Big AI, ensuring systematic review of their acquisitions to safeguard competition in Europe and expanding beyond the current proposals in literature for value-based thresholds or Article 22 EUMR call-in referrals by member states