We are pleased to announce that our paper "Enabling Competition Through Standardisation: Insights on Adversarial Standard Setting from the EU's Interoperability Regulation" has been accepted for publication in theJournal of Competition Law and Economics.
The paper examines how the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Data Act empower the European Commission to impose interoperability standards — covering, for instance, messaging apps and cloud services — as a tool for increasing competition in digital markets. A central contribution is the concept of adversarial standard setting: unlike traditional standardisation contexts, incumbent platforms have strong incentives to resist common standards while rivals stand to gain from them, creating a fundamentally conflictual setting that existing institutions were not designed to handle. Against this backdrop, the paper evaluates the European Commission's two main approaches — delegating standard setting to European Standardisation Organisations (ESOs) or developing standards in-house — and compares their feasibility and effectiveness in fostering competition and contestability in digital markets.
The paper is the product of a truly interdisciplinary collaboration made possible through funding by the Bavarian Research Institute of Digital Transformation(bidt) - ProjectResilient Regulation of Digital Markets(RESREG), bringing together expertise from law, economics, and information systems. The authors are Leonie Ott and Prof. Dr. Thomas Ackermann (both LMU Munich) and Dr. Marcin Roter and Prof. Dr. Jan Krämer (both University of Passau). This interdisciplinary approach reflects the inherently multifaceted nature of digital regulation, which sits at the intersection of legal frameworks, market dynamics, and technological design.