Sony PlayStation to be sued for £5bn in UK class action over excessive pricing
Sony PlayStation is accused of abusing its dominant position by overpaying millions of gamers, developers and publishers for six years. It is alleged that Sony has overcharged people for its products and services by charging a 30% commission for every digital game and add-on content sold through the Sony console or the PlayStation Store since August 2016. According to the legal procedure, the damage is estimated per person. to vary between £67 and £562.
Tidal Wave for Digital Markets in Asia and Oceania
- In line with recent trends, competition authorities around the world are pulling the strings to keep up with the rapid changes in the digital economy. In a case that reminds us of Google’s problems with publishers in France, the New Zealand Commerce Commission has decided to allow news publishers to jointly negotiate with Meta and Google about displaying news content.
- Meanwhile, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission launched an investigation into social media services, specifically targeting the provision of said services and advertising on social media platforms. The Australian authority noted that this is the sixth installment of its five-year investigation into digital platform services.
- In Asia, the Korean Communications Commission has launched an investigation to determine whether Google, Apple and One Store have broken the law by excluding third-party payment providers from their application marketplaces. The authority will conduct its assessment to decide whether they have imposed a specific payment method on users.
- Authorities in Korea have not stopped there, as prosecutors raided Naver, an e-commerce platform, over criminal allegations that it abused its dominance by preventing real estate information providers from selling data to its main competitor. It has been noted that the Korean Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) fined Naver in September 2020 of EUR 776,000 for including exclusivity clauses in its contracts with real estate content providers, which prevented them from working with competing platforms. KFTC filed a criminal complaint with the prosecutors in November 2021 at the request of the Ministry of SME and Startups.
LPG cartel in Brazil
The Brazilian Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) has completed its investigation into allegations of price fixing and market sharing between LPG distributors. The investigation into the cartel was initiated in 2009 by prosecutors and CADE began its investigation in 2016 after obtaining information seized during police raids in 2010. It should be noted that while CADE fined three companies more than EUR 122 million, six other companies had already reached a settlement with the authority after the start of the investigation. In addition, 11 individuals were sanctioned by the authority for their role in the cartel.
US DoJ and Bundeskartellamt Concerns Abort $987 Million MAERSK Deal
Container giant China International Marine Containers has abandoned its plan to acquire Maersk Container Industry, a specialist in the manufacture of cool boxes, following the plan by the US Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division to block the proposed acquisition. The DoJ, which is working with Germany’s Bundeskartellamt, believes the deal would have led to excessive market concentration, potentially leading to higher prices, lower quality and poorer innovation, as 90% of the world’s reefer container production is controlled. would come from Chinese state-controlled enterprises.
WhatsApp could face investigation in India over its privacy policy
The Delhi High Court has ruled that WhatsApp must undergo a full-blown abuse of dominance investigation by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) over the 2021 changes made to the instant messaging application’s privacy policy. The CCI argued that the new privacy policy would allow WhatsApp to collect excessive amounts of consumer data, which could lead to the use and sharing of data in an anti-competitive context. WhatsApp has filed an appeal with parent company Meta to reject the CCI investigation.
0 Comments