Critics from both the right and the left claim that modern antitrust doctrine, rooted in consumer welfare, is inadequate to handle the challenges of the twenty-first century economy. They express nostalgia for 1960s antitrust, when the field had no clear objectives and cases were decided on...

This paper provides a definition of “big data” in antitrust. While big data has become an important topic in the antitrust literature and in competition policy practice, no clear-cut definition of big data has been provided yet. This contribution fills a gap clarifying, that a big data...

The European Commission has proposed a new regulatory tool for the governance of digital markets. The Digital Markets Act (DMA) intents to limit the market behavior of so-called gatekeeper companies to ensure contestable and fair digital markets. We review the provisions of the DMA both from a...

One of the most profound changes in the industrial landscape in the last decade has been the growth of business ecosystems- groups of connected firms, drawing on (digital) platforms which leverage their complementors and lock-in their customers, exploiting the “bottlenecks” that emerge in...

Should internet era merger policy differ from industrial era merger policy? Platform ecosystems rely on economies of scale, data-driven economies of scope, high-quality algorithmic systems, and strong network effects that frequently promote winner-take-most markets. Their market dominance has...

The December 2020 Commission's proposal for a Digital Markets Act (DMA) reached a compromised text with the Council and the Parliament on March 24, 2022. While the text that will impose obligations and prohibition rules on large online platforms acting as "gatekeepers" before any wrongdoing...

The digitisation of existing business models and the new way of doing business of digital platforms pose new challenges both to the performance of companies in the market and to the lives of consumers and users. The dominant digital companies are all American (Google, Facebook, Amazon, and...

Dominant digital platforms such as Google and Facebook collect personal information of users by default precipitating a market failure in the market for personal information. We establish the economic harms from the market failure. We discuss conditions for eliminating the market failure and...

Governments must anticipate today's fast moving technologies to be effective. Blockchain potentially is the ideal tool to assist antitrust in enforcing regulation and fully exploiting its core principles—competition and consumer welfare. Blockchain offers antitrust an enormous opportunity and...

Antitrust cases related to privacy are on the agenda of many competition authorities worldwide, including Europe, the United States, the United Kingdom (the UK), India, Turkey, Germany, and France. Antitrust and privacy is thus "one of the big topics of the year," as stated by the former...