The CrowdJustice Legal Roundup (April 25th — May 1st)
CrowdJustice’s weekly roundup of law, news and legaltech. This week we discuss how Google is causing a legal minefield when it comes to competition and why landlords & their tenants could be in for a wallet-related shock if a new law comes into force unhindered.
The House of Lords on Google: no need for more rules, but for new solutions
Friendsofeurope on Flickr
In a report published on April 20th, the House of Lords EU Select Committee commented on Google’s alleged abuse of their dominant market position.
Not even a week before, Google was charged under EU competition laws for “abusing its position” relating to it’s Android operating system: according to the EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager (pictured above), Google is requiring manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Google’s Chrome browser and set Google Search as default search service on their devices.
Which means that, in the words of Vestager: “Google gives systematic favourable treatment to its comparison shopping product in its general search results pages”. This matters because, by imposing Google search as the primary search service, Google can engage in “vertical integration”, serving both as a marketplace and as a retailer, which is likely to harm competition.
Are we equipped to deal with these kind of issues? The committee seem to think that we don’t need any more rules to deal with these cases: “it is not possible to formulate useful general rules about vertical integration” and “abuse must be ascertained through rigorous case by case analysis”, they said. But the question remains: what to do once the abuse is ascertained?
Across the pond, some French MPs suggested asking Google to make its algorithms transparent to the French telecommunications regulator, Arcep. It seems indeed an interesting solution, but is it viable? Currently Google claims that its AI-fuelled algorithms are so complex that even its own engineers struggle to understand them — if this is truly the case, the chances of a regulator being able to make heads or tails of it seem low.
Do hard times beckon for tenants?
It doesn’t sound like news: rent in London and across the UK is soaring. So, will the new measure imposed on landlords by Clause 24 of the Finance Act 2015 make things even harder for landlords and their tenants in the UK housing market?
This is what the supporters of the “Tenant Tax” case on CrowdJustice are claiming. Section 24 provides for a reduction on the tax breaks for renting out properties, which come into force from April 2017. As a consequence, landlords will no longer be able to deduct all of their finance costs from their property and according to the campaigners, they will be forced to sell up or increase the rent.
The case, launched by two business owners, has raised two rounds of more than £50,000 on CrowdJustice.
Enjoyed this? If you’d like to know more about crowdfunding legal cases, drop us a line at info@crowdjustice.com.
Have a legal case that could benefit from crowdfunding?
