Episode 31- Anna Tzanaki - The Future of EU Merger Control and the DMA's Institutional Design

In this episode, Anush Ganesh and Jasper van den Boom speak with Dr Anna Tzanaki, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Leeds and Affiliate Fellow of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Anna's research sits at the intersection of merger control, digital markets regulation, and institutional design across the EU, US, and UK. We discuss three of her recent pieces. First, her Antitrust Law Journal article on killer acquisitions and EU merger control, which examines why the Court of Justice rejected the Commission's repurposing of Article 22 in Illumina/Grail and what that judgment reveals about the constitutional limits of Commission discretion. Second, her JECLAP article co-authored with Julian Nowag, which maps the DMA's institutional architecture onto a compliance-enforcement continuum and interrogates the virtues of its procedural flexibility in counterbalancing the fixed nature of its substantive obligations on designated gatekeepers. Third, her ProMarket piece responding to the Commission's draft EU Merger Guidelines, which she characterises as "Schrödinger's cat" -- full of possibilities but short on certainties. Across the conversations, Anna posits for a more balanced view that takes into account context and institutional complementarities to alleviate tensions between institutional flexibility and the demands of legal certainty, principled constraint, and democratic accountability. Whether the current direction of EU competition law is getting that balance right is the question we put to Anna at the close of the episode.