Antitrust in Action: Regulating Tech Giants with Hierarchy and Experimentalism

Although contemporary concerns about ‘tech giants’ make competition policy an especially salient domain, today, there is not even consensus on how this policy really operates. By studying the life of EU antitrust after the ‘modernization’ reforms that greatly altered its institutional structure in 2003, the article partially challenges both the influential view that these reforms have generally strengthened the Commission’s traditional dominance over national authorities and an alternative view that they have stimulated widespread emergence of novel ‘experimentalist’ discretion, review and revision. It shows that despite EU competition policy’s hierarchical foundations, experimentalist governance has penetrated even this domain. But the extent to which actors perceive strategic uncertainty and engage in experimentalism can vary even within the same policy domain. After initial engagement with experimentalism, moreover, actors may ‘stumble back into hierarchy’. Most broadly, the article demonstrates the advantages of theoretically nuanced and empirically granular analyses also studying processes in practice.