Asia Tipline

GCR ASIA - 02 April 2021

Cambodia is still set to take its seat at the table of Association of Southeast Asian Nations that have a competition law. The country is continuing its push toward implementing antitrust legislation, as it remains the only country in ASEAN without one. We’re off next week but will be back in your inbox the following Friday with all the latest from around the Asia-Pacific region.

GCR ASIA - 26 March 2021

Indonesia’s antitrust watchdog this week raised concerns about the potential competitive harm caused by directors that sit on the boards of rival companies in the same market, advising the country’s Ministry of State Owned Enterprises to tweak regulations that allow for such an overlap. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, a former senior competition official has urged her former agency to investigate a potential pork cartel. Now a lawmaker, Stella Quimbo said the country’s “pork mafia” might be artificially keeping prices high.

GCR ASIA - 19 March 2021

The Australian government has spent the past several months orchestrating a law that forces Google and Facebook to pay for displaying news content. That has been met with varying degrees of pushback from the two technology companies, although they now have both cemented deals with New Corporation, a major force in the country’s news landscape.

GCR ASIA - 12 March 2021

Indian politician NK Singh, who chairs the country’s Finance Commission, quoted Roman poet Ovid last Friday when he spoke at the country’s sixth National Conference on Economics of Competition Law. “A horse never runs as fast as when he has other horses to catch up and outpace,” Singh said at the top of his prepared remarks. Alive when the calendar turned from BC to AD, Ovid is perhaps best known for his 15-book mythological narrative Metamorphoses. Yet more than 2,000 years after his death, his words are being used to explain the raw benefits of competition.

GCR ASIA - 05 March 2021

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Rod Sims on Wednesday gave a speech marking the 10 year anniversary of the Competition and Consumer Act in Australia. The law incorporates the Australian Competition Law and focused more on boosting the agency’s consumer protection powers.

GCR ASIA - 25 February 2021

There were big developments in Australia this week, where the government has been in a months-long battle with Google and Facebook over a mandatory code that would force them to pay for displaying news content.

GCR ASIA - 19 February 2021

Digital platforms remain the flavour of the day in the antitrust world, and competition watchdogs in Indonesia and Japan are the latest to issue reports on the sector. Also in this week’s Tipline, the saga over whether Google and Facebook should pay for news has reached a boiling point in Australia, with the former inking a major deal with NewsCorp and the latter claiming it plans to just stop sharing news on its platform in Australia.

GCR ASIA - 12 February 2021

Today is Chinese New Year, and the lunar calendar has transitioned from the “Year of the Metal Rat” to the “Year of the Metal Ox”. Each year in the 12-year cycle has a Chinese Zodiac, but the cycle also accounts for five elements – wood, fire, earth, metal and water – and this is the first time the metal ox has been represented since 1961. China’s competition authority will likely embrace the time off, as it has been increasingly busy in the waning weeks of the last lunar year.

GCR ASIA - 04 February 2021

Google has threatened to completely pull out of the Australian market for internet search if the government goes forward with a plan forcing it and Facebook to pay news media businesses for displaying their content. Microsoft has said that it would be able to fill the void left by Google with its Bing search engine, although it is not immediately clear whether Bing would be subject to the code. Google features in several stories in this week’s briefing.

GCR ASIA - 22 January 2021

The Asia-Pacific briefing is off next week, but we have a full slate of stories to tide you over, including important developments in China’s crusade against homegrown technology companies. We also noticed hints of a developing trend, as Google closed its merger with Fitbit despite ongoing reviews in Australia and the US; and the London Stock Exchange Group indicated it will close its acquisition of Refinitiv next week despite an open probe in Singapore.