Although the European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines acknowledge that consolidation in digital platforms can harm the democratic process, they need to up their efforts to protect media competition and a quality public sphere. Vicky Robertson provides three steps to rectify this oversight.
This article is part of a symposium on the European Commission’s draft Guidelines on the assessment of mergers under Council Regulation. The new merger guidelines mark their first systemic update since their first release in two parts in 2004 and 2008. You can read the rest of the contributions to the symposium as we publish them here. We encourage responses to our symposium, which can be submitted to promarket@chicagobooth.edu.
The resilience of liberal democracy is being tested on many fronts. Democracy indices, such as the Liberal Democracy Index by the V-Dem Institute or the World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, are at an all-time low and provide a sound warning that it is high time for governments to prioritize the protection of democratic values and processes.
A particular challenge for liberal democracy is the digitalization of everything, including of democratic public life, with the digital public sphere and interactions on digital platforms—including social media, online news outlets, and online forums—complementing and sometimes replacing traditional public debate. Research has shown that digital media are having a detrimental effect on liberal democracy. Recommendation algorithms decide what content users see premised on user engagement rather than the public interest. This means more rage bait and misinformation. News consumption has moved online, marginalizing journalistic news outlets and subjecting quality news to the advertising logic of digital platforms. Side-door access to news through search engines, social media platforms or artificial intelligence chatbots is becoming the norm, further diminishing quality journalism.
What does this have to do with the ongoing review of the European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines?
More than first meets the eye.
Merger control provides competition authorities and courts with a strong tool to address market concentration before it gets out of hand and to shape markets in a pro-competitive way for the future. As the Big Tech M&A Tracker shows, digital platform markets are consolidating at lightning speed, placing decisions over the digital public sphere in ever fewer hands. This in turn risks media plurality: access to many sources of news, competition among which encourages high journalistic standards and a diversity of viewpoints. The ongoing review of the EU’s draft Merger Guidelines provides a rare opportunity to sharpen and to shape the European Commission’s approach to keeping digital media concentration in check.
Democratic antitrust for digital markets: address digital (media) concentration
As I discuss in my forthcoming book Democratic Antitrust for Digital Markets, merger control can more fully account for the effects of digital mergers on democratic values and processes. For instance, theories of harm can reflect the non-price parameters of competition that matter in digital media markets. This strengthens different facets of media pluralism, including the diversity of sources, of content, and of exposure. When it comes to merger remedies, these can be structured to “facilitate essential democratic practices.” Merger control can thereby contribute to safeguarding liberal democracy in digital platform markets in various ways, some smaller and some more impactful.
The EU’s draft Merger Guidelines and democracy
The Commission acknowledged in its initial 2025 consultation document, which stood at the beginning of its review of the merger guidelines, that increasingly large companies become “difficult to regulate for democratic institutions.” The draft Merger Guidelines, published by the Commission in April 2026, show first tentative signs that they recognize what is at stake when it comes to digital media concentration. When discussing the role of EU merger control, the draft Guidelines highlight that “EU merger control contributes to maintaining a balance of power that is essential to democratic societies.” What steps could the Commission now take to strengthen the draft Merger Guidelines’ positive impact on liberal democracy in digital markets?
The Commission as a central actor
The draft Merger Guidelines indicate that the Commission will gladly leave the role of watchdog over media concentration to the EU member states. While the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) requires member states to review mergers for their impact on media pluralism, the Commission emphasizes that it will not carry out such a review itself. It thereby relegates a great deal of the responsibility for the assessment of digital media mergers to the member states. As the digital platforms that have the biggest impact on democratic values like media pluralism and user choice have a pan-EU reach, it is important not to leave this monumental task to individual member states. In addition, there remains an issue of scope: While the media pluralism review foreseen by EMFA will apply to some mergers that involve digital platforms, not all digital platforms that are central to today’s digital public sphere—and thus to modern democracy—come under the new regime. EMFA only applies if a digital platform is recognized as a media service provider, which in turn depends on the editorial control the digital platform exercises over content published on its platform. However, as I argue in my book, many digital platforms that EMFA does not consider media service providers will nevertheless have an important impact on democratic processes and values. In those cases, EU merger control is the only legal regime to assess this concentration. As the guardian of the EU Founding Treaties, including Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, which concerns the EU’s democratic foundation, the European Commission must assume this crucial role.
Non-price parameters of competition
The draft Merger Guidelines pursue a “competition dynamic” approach: rather than integrating democratic values such as media pluralism into a merger assessment, they propose, per paragraph nine, relying on the automatism that “limiting concentration in the media sector [ultimately] supports diversity and plurality of information sources and choice for EU citizens.” However, the draft Guidelines also point out in footnote 20 that the Commission will apply general principles to media mergers, “taking into account parameters such as diversity of (information) supply where relevant for competition.”
Over the past decade, EU competition law has increasingly refocused on non-price parameters of competition. They figured prominently in a digital abuse of dominance case, when the General Court highlighted in Google Android (2022) that users’ interests in a plurality of information sources not only align “with competition on the merits, … but [are] also necessary in order to ensure plurality in a democratic society.” Non-price parameters of competition were also an important theme in the 2024 update to the EU Market Definition Notice, which I discussed here. It is now merger control’s turn to account for the importance of this qualitative dimension.
If merger control were more receptive to those dimensions of the digital media industry that support quality information and that matter to liberal democracy and users, it could certainly have a positive impact on digital media markets. For example, it could limit the erosion of quality news and journalism that the ongoing concentration is leading to. As the draft Guidelines highlight, one needs to first assess what constitutes “a relevant parameter of competition in the relevant market” in the context of digital media mergers. This could include multiple dimensions of quality such as editorial independence, choice, reliability, accuracy (versus misinformation), the fact that news helps with understanding complex issues, communicating opinions, providing online/offline offerings, and more. The draft Guidelines draw attention to media and cultural diversity as aspects of choice as well as to privacy as a further relevant quality dimension in platform markets. It is for the competition authority to assess how a merger or acquisition would impact these quality dimensions, and the Commission emphasizes that it “enjoys a margin of discretion in weighing such price and non-price parameters of competition” to arrive at an overall assessment. Non-price parameters of competition have a direct bearing on the theory of harm, and it would be beneficial to provide use cases of this connection. As an instructive example, in the 2023 merger of media brands Vivendi and Lagardère, the Commission addressed two non-price parameters: a possible degradation of the media outlets’ quality, as well as a reduction in editorial diversity. This ultimately led to structural remedies.
The review of the EU’s Merger Guidelines provides an opportunity to engage in a more in-depth discussion of how to include non-price parameters of competition into the merger assessment, as part and parcel of the significant impediment to effective competition (SIEC) test. As these questions are difficult to address in the abstract, concrete examples could provide much-needed guidance to digital (media) platforms and to those companies and user-citizens that are directly affected by digital (media) mergers. This type of insight could make non-price parameters of competition more actionable in everyday merger enforcement. It would also be instructive for national competition authorities in the EU looking to the EU Merger Guidelines for guidance when applying their national merger rules (and, perhaps, EMFA).
Merger control, media pluralism and EMFA
As the draft Guidelines state, “[i]ndependent media services play an important role in the internal market. They strengthen the rule of law and democratic resilience, thereby fulfilling a general interest function.” At the same time, the draft Guidelines make it clear that the Commission has no intention of carrying out a fully-fledged media pluralism review. While it is true, of course, that the “purpose and legal frameworks for competition assessments and media plurality review differ” to some degree, these reviews do overlap in important respects. In some jurisdictions, it is the competition authority that is primarily tasked with conducting the media plurality review foreseen by EMFA (see Austria’s implementation of EMFA 2026). EMFA provides that competent authorities should take due account of the online environment and any ecosystem that the companies involved may form part of. This is know-how that many competition authorities possess. Where a media concentration has repercussions on the EU internal market, the competent authority needs to consult with the Media Board, and the European Commission can issue an opinion, per Articles 22 and 23 of the EMFA. In many cases, it is therefore no longer possible to isolate a “general” merger review from a media plurality review. Against this background, it is sensible to seek synergies between the two wherever possible. For instance, a coordination mechanism that allows for a more targeted flow of information between authorities could be helpful.
Next steps
The forthcoming EU Merger Guidelines will have an important impact on whether or not digital (media) platforms continue to consolidate, and how these mergers and acquisitions impact the digital public sphere that is central for our liberal democracy. This article discussed three concrete steps that can help realise the Merger Guidelines’ potential of protecting democratic values through merger control:
(i) The European Commission needs to assume its role as a central actor when it comes to merger control of digital media platforms. This also closes any possible gap between merger control at the European level and media plurality reviews at the national level of the member states.
(ii) In the substantive assessment of digital platform mergers, non-price parameters are key as they can be directly related to democratic values. The Merger Guidelines should provide more detailed insight into how a merger assessment can account for these non-price parameters, such as quality and choice, and how they can be made actionable in theories of harm.
(iii) To ensure that EU merger control and national media pluralism reviews under the European Media Freedom Act go hand in hand, synergies between the two instruments should be sought.
Author Disclosure: The author reports no conflicts of interest. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
Subscribe here for ProMarket’s weekly newsletter, Special Interest, to stay up to date on ProMarket’s coverage of the political economy and other content from the Stigler Center.
