He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils - Sir Francis Bacon, Essays (1597) Before, during, and after my work with Jason Furman and colleagues on the Digital Competition Expert Panel, we were repeatedly told that a key reason for introducing an ex ante regulatory instrument was the long delay in resolving abuse of dominance cases. The poster child for this argument was Google Shopping, which took over a decade to reach a remedy.1 We were so taken with this example that we gave it a shout-out in our report, Unlocking Digital Competition, as a case study for how a potential Code of Conduct might operate.2 A week after our Furman report was published, European Competition Commissioner Vestager announced that the Shopping remedy was working.3 I found this heartening, still considering that the primary problem was the long time it took to reach the remedy. As I examined the cited figures of success, though, it became clear to me that even after all that time, the remedy did not work at all. I felt like the small child in another Danish story, The Emperor’s New Clothes. To me, it seemed obvious that in a case that is all about the visibility of comparison shopping services (CSS) on Google, all that the remedy guaranteed was their invisibility.
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Philip Marsden (2020) studied this question.