Southampton Law School Hosts Dr Christian Bergqvist as a Visiting Scholar
From 3-7 March 2025, Southampton Law School welcomed Dr Christian Bergqvist (Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Denmark) as a Visiting Scholar.
On 3 March, Dr Bergqvist gave a seminar titled 'AI Collusion – Should We Be Concerned?' as part of the Centre for Law and Technology seminar series Afternoon Tea Talks on the Law and AI.
With case law examples, Dr Bergqvist discussed how AI collusion and AI-driven decision making could enable companies to coordinate their behaviour in anti-competitive manners. Dr Bergqvist reflected upon the fundamental aspects such as the present of an enforcer and information exchange, that are essential to develop a successful cartel and highlighted that whilst AI and algorithms can support the collusion through more efficient enforcement and information exchange, those criteria are still required for the cartel to operate optimally. AI is therefore just a tool to improve the success rate of the cartel, but not a challenge that the competition authorities are not aware off or able to deal with.
Dr Bergqvist also gave a guest seminar to our students interested in competition law and intellectual property law as part of his stay. The seminar focused on Google and its many antitrust cases worldwide: ‘Taking Stock of Google’s Antitrust Troubles as the World Turns Against It’. In the seminar, the students were treated to a worldwide tour of Google’s cases by  Dr Bergqvist who highlighted that the most prominent and troublesome cases for Google, but also discussed Google’s business strategies through the cases illustrating how Google is continuing to maintain it’s core business empire: the search engine.
Dr. Bergqvist is a leading expert in EU Competition Law, with a particular focus on its application to deregulated and network-based sectors such as telecommunications, energy, postal services, and transport. His research also delves deeply into issues related to abuse of dominance within these industries. With a wealth of experience as both an academic and practitioner, Dr. Bergqvist uniquely bridges the gap between theoretical research and practical application.
In recent years, his work has expanded to examine the complexities of digital platforms, Big Tech, and companies such as Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet)—analysing their profound impact on competition and regulation.
