ALTI Amsterdam

[event] Geoffrey A. Manne: DMA Goes Global
2025-10-10 12:00 - 13:00 (Europe/Paris) | VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Organizer: Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (ALTI).
Speaker: Geoffrey A. Manne is the president and founder of the International Center for Law and Economics (ICLE), a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center based in Portland, Oregon. He is also a Visiting Professor at IE University in Madrid, and a distinguished fellow at Northwestern University’s Center on Law, Business, and Economics. Manne holds AB & JD degrees from the University of Chicago. He is an expert in the economic analysis of law, focusing particularly on antitrust, consumer protection, telecom, IP, and technology regulation. From 2003 to 2006 he was an assistant professor at Lewis & Clark Law School where he taught law & economics, international economic regulation, corporations, and other courses. In 2006 he decamped from Lewis & Clark to work in Microsoft’s legal department, heading up a program on law & economics academic engagement. He subsequently founded ICLE in 2009. Prior to teaching, Manne practiced antitrust law and appellate litigation at Latham & Watkins, clerked for Hon. Morris S. Arnold on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, and worked as a research assistant for Judge Richard A. Posner. He was also once (very briefly) employed by the FTC. His writings and publications are available at SSRN and ICLE.
Description: This presentation will examine the rise of Digital Competition Regulations (DCRs) such as the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and their global counterparts. It will argue that DCRs will depart fundamentally from traditional competition law, prioritizing rent redistribution, the facilitation of rivals, and the deliberate weakening of successful platforms over consumer welfare or innovation. Drawing on cases like Apple’s DMA compliance and the Android Auto decision, the talk will highlight the conceptual ambiguities, innovation risks, and broader paradigm shift these regulations will represent for competition policy worldwide.
Format: Geoffrey A. Manne will give a 30-minute talk, followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Thibault Schrepel and a Q&A with the audience.
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[event] Frederic Jenny: The Five Crises of Competition Law
2025-12-10 12:00 - 13:00
Organizer: Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (ALTI).
Speaker: Frédéric Jenny holds a Ph.D in Economics from Harvard University (1975), a Doctorate in Economics from the University of Paris (1977) and an MBA degree from ESSEC Business School (1966). He is Emeritus Professor of Economics at ESSEC Business School in Paris and President of the International Committee of Concurrences Review. He is Chairman of the OECD Global Competition Forum, and former Co-Director of the European Center for Law and Economics of ESSEC. He was previously Non-Executive Director of the Office of Fair Trading in the United Kingdom (2007-2014), Judge on the French Supreme Court (Cour de cassation, Economic Commercial and Financial Chamber) from 2004 to August 2012, Vice Chair of the French Competition Authority (1993-2004) and President of the WTO Working Group on Trade and Competition (1994-2003). He was visiting professor at Northwestern University Department of Economics in the United States (1978), Keio University Department of Economics in Japan (1984), University of Capetown Business School in South Africa (1991), Haifa University School of Law in Israel (2012). He was Visiting Professor at University College London Law School (2005-2010), Global Professor of Antitrust in the New York University School of Law’s Hauser Global Law School (2014, 2017 and 2022) and Senior Fellow in the Online Global Competition and Consumer Law Masters Program, University of Melbourne (Australia) (2016-2018)
Description: Industrial policy to promote growth through innovation has taken center stage in Europe’s economic policy. What do we know about the economics of innovation and the respective roles of competition and industrial policy in the promotion of innovation? Under which condition could these two policies be complementary?
Format: Frederic Jenny will give a 30-minute talk, followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Thibault Schrepel and a Q&A with the audience.
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[event] Teodora Groza: Governing Foundation Models
2026-03-05 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Teodora Groza is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen. She has obtained a PhD in law from Sciences Po Law School and has held visiting positions at Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School. Her work is underlined by the belief that technological developments need to be paired with governance innovations and investigates the fitness of various legal interventions for ensuring AI alignment. Methodologically, she leverages the toolkit of law and economics, in particular organizational and institutional economics.
She has published on data markets, the governance of AI companies, the role of regulation in promoting innovation, and the impact of new business models on the EU and US antitrust frameworks. She regularly intervenes at academic, civil society, and industry conferences.
Description: Senior executives of frontier AI labs have recently described AI foundation models as either “infrastructures” or “platforms.” Although these terms are often used interchangeably in legal and governance debates, economists distinguish between the effects and incentive structures they generate. This talk examines the role of foundation models in today’s economy and disentangles their platform-like and infrastructure-like characteristics. Building on this distinction, it situates foundation models within the existing regulatory architectures of platforms (e.g. social media, digital marketplaces) and infrastructures (e.g. public utilities). It then analyzes how different governance choices would shape access, competition, and the allocation of regulatory authority.
Organizer: Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (ALTI).
Format: Teodora Groza will give a 30-minute talk, followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Thibault Schrepel and a Q&A with the audience.
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[event] Jonathan Barnett: When Antitrust Gets It Wrong
2026-04-13 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Jonathan Barnett is director of the law school’s Media, Entertainment and Technology Law Program and the author of The Big Steal: Ideology, Interest, and the Undoing of Intellectual Property (Oxford University Press 2024) and Innovators, Firms, and Markets: The Organizational Logic of Intellectual Property (Oxford University Press 2021).. Barnett specializes in antitrust, intellectual property, and corporate and business law, with a focus on innovation policy and strategy in technology markets. Barnett has published in the Harvard Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Yale Law Journal, Journal of Legal Studies, Jurimetrics, Review of Law & Economics, and other scholarly journals. He also regularly comments in the press and at conferences on legal and policy issues concerning antitrust and intellectual property. He joined USC in 2006 and was a visiting professor at NYU School of Law in 2010. He is also an academic affiliate of the International Center for Law & Economics. Prior to academia, Barnett practiced corporate law as a senior associate at Cleary Gottlieb LLP in New York, specializing in private equity and mergers and acquisitions transactions. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Barnett received a MPhil from Cambridge University and a JD from Yale Law School.
Description: Patent holdup. Killer acquisitions. Kill zones. Default bias. Four influential theories of harm, and four cases where weak evidence drove major policy interventions. This talk offers a critical assessment of the new competition orthodoxy.
Organizer: Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (ALTI).
Format: Jonathan Barnett will give a 30-minute talk, followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Thibault Schrepel and a Q&A with the audience.

[event] Pablo Ibáñez Colomo: Green Technologies & Competition Law
2026-04-30 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Pablo Ibáñez Colomo is Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also an Ordinary Member at the Competition Appeal Tribunal, a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Bruges) and one of the Joint General Editors of the Journal of European Competition Law & Practice (Oxford University Press). He received a PhD from the European University Institute in June 2010 (Jacques Lassier Prize). Before joining the EUI as a Researcher in 2007, he taught for three years at the Law Department of the College of Europe (Bruges), where he also completed an LLM in 2004. He has been a Visiting Professor at several institutions around the world, including Aix-Marseille University, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Kobe University and Torcuato di Tella University.
Description: Green technologies pose a major threat to incumbents in many industries, from energy to transport and food. It is therefore rational for the latter to display anticompetitive strategies aimed at delaying technological change. It would be logical for competition authorities around the world to focus on these strategies.
Organizer: Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (ALTI).
Format: Pablo Ibáñez Colomo will give a 30-minute talk, followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Thibault Schrepel and a Q&A with the audience.

[event] Catalina Goanta: Miniconsumers
2026-06-02 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Catalina Goanta is Associate Professor in Private Law and Technology and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant HUMANads, focused on understanding the impact of content monetization on social media and on reinterpreting private law fairness in the context of platform governance. Between 2016–2021 she was Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University, and during February 2018–February 2019, she was a Niels Stensen fellow and visited the University of St. Gallen (The Institute of Work and Employment) and Harvard University (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society).
Description: “The kids aren’t alright.” In the EU and beyond, policy attention has recently turned to children’s online activities. Many countries, from Australia to Brazil, are doubling down on platform regulation and social media bans, adopting new data protection and children’s rights frameworks to oversee these activities and protect minors from harms ranging from grooming to problematic or addictive use.
Yet this narrative is missing an important component: children are also consumers, and their online presence is based on transactions and contracts they may or may not have the legal capacity to enter into. This presentation explores the research gap surrounding children’s legal capacity: what minors are and are not permitted to engage with contractually in digital environments, and whether current legal standards should evolve in light of emerging scientific evidence.
Organizer: Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (ALTI).
Format: Catalina Goanta will give a 30-minute talk, followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Thibault Schrepel and a Q&A with the audience.

[event] Marco Almada: The Hidden Costs of Technology-Neutral Regulation
2026-06-18 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Marco Almada is a researcher working on matters of law and technology. He currently works as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Cyber Policy at the University of Luxembourg, focusing on AI regulation and cybersecurity. His research is directed towards theoretical and doctrinal issues in regulation, with a special focus on the learning mechanisms used for navigating scenarios of deep socio-technical uncertainty. He has written extensively on the regulatory frameworks being designed for AI technologies and on the governance of AI in the public sector.
Description: Technology neutrality appears in instruments ranging from WTO trade rules to EU legislation on AI and platform governance, yet scholars and policymakers consistently struggle to define what it requires in practice. Marco Almada’s paper proposes a unifying framework: technology-neutral regulation is a delegation of power, specifically the power to determine how general rules apply to particular technologies. That reframing connects otherwise disparate accounts in the literature and explains why technology-neutral approaches often fall short or produce unintended side effects. Applied to EU digital regulation, the framework shows how abstraction from technical detail concentrates power in the hands of certain public and private actors while weakening existing accountability mechanisms.
Organizer: Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (ALTI).
Format: Marco Almada will give a 30-minute talk, followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Thibault Schrepel and a Q&A with the audience.

[event] Jason Potts – Institutional Acceleration: Theory and Applications
2026-06-29 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Jason Potts is an evolutionary and institutional economist who specializes in economic dynamics and innovation in the digital economy, with a focus on the consequences of AI and blockchain technology. He works on the theory and policy of contribution systems, innovation commons, cryptoeconomics, creative industries and economic complexity. He is an editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics.
Description: New digital technologies now enable innovation directly in economic institutions, an evolutionary process that Potts calls ‘institutional acceleration’. This talk will review the theory of i/acc and discuss several case studies in the context of Saudi economic transformation (Vision 2030), new high-speed low-IP innovation systems emerging in Chinese cities, and new financial technologies for ecological regeneration to transform voluntary contributions into capital.
Organizer: Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (ALTI).
Format: Jason Potts will give a 30-minute talk, followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Thibault Schrepel and a Q&A with the audience.
