Well, hello there. Welcome to another week of regulatory affairs. I'm James Panicki,

senior editor with M-lex's Asia Bureau, and I'm coming to you from the LexisNexis offices in Melbourne, Australia.

It's great to have your company.

Now you don't have to be a European Union antitrust nerd to have heard of Article 102.

That's Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU.

It has been in the news because it's the law that has been used to inflict some real pain on big tech, the likes of Microsoft, Google, Intel and others.

It prohibits abusive conduct by companies that have a dominant position on a particular market.

So it's a big law that companies doing business in the EU have to contend with.

Yet, thanks to the increased sophistication of lawyers, economists and the companies themselves,

Article 102 has lost some of its shine.

Add to that mix, the 32 rulings that EU judges have issued dealing

specifically with 102, and it all means that the landscape is a little trickier for EU enforcers.

So what's the European Commission, the EU's competition enforcer, planning to do about that?

Well, for starters, it's ridding itself of some unwanted baggage.

Lewis Crofts is Mlex's editor at large. He recently hosted a panel discussion on this very issue,

and he's with us now from Brussels. So, Lewis, if Article 102 is indeed such a powerful tool

and has been used so successfully against

big tech, why are EU officials tinkering with it now? Well, James, Article 102 really is the

Commission's big bazooka. It's very powerful, but it's not without its problems. The Commission

has lost a couple of rather big cases in the courts in recent years.

And so they've decided it's time to look again.

Not at the law.

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