7.3 Emerging Trends in Competition Policy

1. Sustainability: the green-agreements debate — can rivals cooperate on environmental goals (joint recycling, emission standards) without cartel taint? The EU's sustainability guidelines as the pioneer text; the "competition as if planet mattered" movement. 2. Data privacy: privacy as a quality dimension of competition — degrading privacy as a competitive harm (the theories joining the two fields); data portability and interoperability as remedies. 3. Labour-market antitrust: no-poach and wage-fixing as cartel conduct; monopsony's rise (Unit 5). 4. Industrial-policy tension: strategic sectors, national champions, and security-driven mergers — competition's political counter-current. 5. Algorithmic collusion: pricing algorithms learning to "talk" — collusion without a meeting (the hub-and-spoke of the platform age); the detection frontier. 6. The institutional turn: longer-case criticism; the new ex-ante codes; merger-enforcement revisionism — the field's self-examination everywhere at once.