Recent cases have seen competition regulators intervening against tech giants, Facebook in particular. The most recent is a ruling in Germany, where the competition watchdog did not issue a fine, but instead ordered Facebook to stop practices which are a key part of the company’s business model. This, alongside other ongoing cases, could be a signal of a new regulatory trend, in which antitrust regulators aim to solve the issues that privacy regulators alone have not been able to address. Once again, Europe is leading the way, with countries elsewhere watching attentively.

On 18 January 2019, The Italian regulator AGCOM has published the long-awaited draft review of the Wholesale Broadband Access markets (Markets 3a/3b and 4 of the EC’s Recommendation on relevant markets). The proposal aims to deregulate the market in Milan, and introduces nuanced price control remedies in the rest of the country, recognising market evolution of recent years. The publication of the lengthy and complex document (454 pages long) was delayed due to Telecom Italia proposing the legal separation of its fixed network, in a way similar to the separation of Openreach within the BT Group in the UK. AGCOM has provisionally concluded that the plan does not affect the shape of WBA markets in a significant way, and leaves the regulatory burden on TIM nearly intact compared to the past. This could be a further incentive for TIM to ditch the plan, at a time when a change of leadership is now pushing for the network to be entirely spun off and merged with wholesale-only operator Open Fiber.