Professor Akman trains judges from the EU in topics of digital economy

Professor Pinar Akman provided training to over thirty national judges from different EU Member States.

Professor Pinar Akman, Director of the Centre for Business Law and Practice, spoke at the training event on 14 December 2018 in Duesseldorf, Germany, under a scheme co-funded by the ‘Training of National Judges Programme of the European Union’ and organised by the Academy of European Law (ERA). The training was part of a series of lectures on ‘Antitrust Enforcement in Digital Markets’ which focussed on ‘Enforcement in the framework of Article 102 TFEU and merger control’. 

Professor Akman’s lecture was on the topic of ‘the role of the “free” side of a market: the role of data” in the context of online services offered for free to users (eg Google Search, Facebook, etc). Her lecture considered questions such as whether a relevant antitrust market can be defined for such ‘free’ services on the basis of the data which the platforms collect from users, and, data-related abuses as well as the approach privacy concerns under competition law.

Professor Akman had previously provided such training to national judges in the first instalment of the training series on antitrust enforcement in digital markets, where she had spoken on online vertical restraints (June 2018, Budapest).

In November 2017, Professor Akman was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize (£100,000) which she is using to continue her research into various aspects of the application of competition law in digital markets.