Between violent and non-violent action strategies: a study on extreme-right organizations in Italy and Spain. IHS Political Science Series No. 130, July 2012

This paper focuses on the different forms of action adopted by extreme right organizations (both political parties and non-party groups) in Italy and Spain during their recent mobilization and links them to the environmental conditions and internal organizational factors which might affect them. With particular attention paid to the actors’ perceptions of reality, the macro-level factors (such as the favourable or unfavourable political opportunities of the context, the availability of allies in power, the degree of repression by authorities, etc.) as well as the meso-level factors (such as the internal characteristics of extreme right groups and their dynamics) will be explored in order to understand the action strategies of extreme right organizations and their recourse to violence. This paper, drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative research techniques, will be based on 20 semi-structured interviews with extreme right representatives of the main right wing organizations in Italy and Spain as well as a protest event analysis of newspapers dating from 2005 to 2009.

Searching for harm or harming search? A look at the European Commission’s antitrust investigation against Google. CEPS Special Report No. 118/September 2015

As the European Commission’s antitrust investigation against Google approaches its final stages, its contours and likely outcome remain obscure and blurred by a plethora of nonantitrust-related arguments. At the same time, the initial focus on search neutrality as an antitrust principle seems to have been abandoned by the European Commission, in favour of a more standard allegation of ‘exclusionary abuse’, likely to generate anticompetitive foreclosure of Google’s rivals. This paper discusses search neutrality as an antitrust principle, and then comments on the current investigation based on publicly available information. The paper provides a critical assessment of the likely tests that will be used for the definition of the relevant product market, the criteria for the finding of dominance, the anticompetitive foreclosure test and the possible remedies that the European Commission might choose. Overall, and regardless of the outcome of the Google case, the paper argues that the current treatment of exclusionary abuses in Internet markets is in urgent need of a number of important clarifications, and has been in this condition for more than a decade. The hope is that the European Commission will resist the temptation to imbue the antitrust case with an emphasis and meaning that have nothing to do with antitrust (from industrial policy motives to privacy, copyright or media law arguments) and that, on the contrary, the Commission will devote its efforts to sharpening its understanding of dynamic competition in cyberspace, and the tools that should be applied in the analysis of these peculiar, fast-changing and often elusive settings.