Competition law and the effectiveness of intellectual property rights: A revolution in the making?

Abstract The article examines whether the relationship between EU (or national) competition law and intellectual property rights may undergo any developments following the recent set of decisions by the French Competition Authority against Google. In these decisions, competition law was used to improve the effectiveness of press publishers rights granted by the Directive on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market. Therefore, competition law had rather a supporting role vis‐à‐vis certain intellectual property rights, instead of constituting an external layer and limiting excessive forms of exercise of intellectual property rights. We argue that while there is no shift in paradigm on the interface between EU competition law and intellectual property rights, the discussed decisions do contribute to this debate by putting that relation in a different context when intellectual property holder suffers from anti‐competitive conduct and might pave the way to a fruitful interface in the future.