Free!! Google and Facebook!!! We all know them, what to worry about? Everything! The giants of the internet are expanding into every corner of the economy, politics and our lives. They control the majority of digital advertising; Alphabet, Google's parent, and Facebook receive more than 60...

Prior to the invention of the Internet, shopping for goods was relatively simple: a consumer visited a brick-and-mortal retailer and selected a product from what was available or, for some retailers, shopped using a catalog. Today, a simple Internet search may return a bewildering number of...

We consider the merits of the recent EU’s Digital Markets Act from the perspective of innovation and value creation. We conceptualize innovation as new interactions being created by the digital platform leading to ‘value creation’, in contrast to facilitating existing interactions or...

The purpose of this article is to share the lessons learned by the French Competition Authority (“FCA”) following its first in-depth investigation of a merger case involving two major online platforms. The FCA believes that anti-competitive risks arising out of Internet platform mergers must...

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...

The Digital Markets Act makes clear choices about important tradeoffs in value to constrain the arbitrary power and dominance of gatekeepers over digital markets and guarantee a more equitable distribution of value with business users. We argue that the extent those objectives will be realized...

This paper focuses on one of the most important digital platform sectors—E-commerce—addressing the antitrust enforcement, comparing it with new regulatory approaches, learning from experiences in the US, EU, China, and Japan. E-commerce is shown to have distinct characteristics, as compared...

The proposed regulation launched by the European Commission on the gatekeepers' regime under the name of the Digital Market Act and the Digital Services Act represents an important change in the regulation and commitments of the platforms that initially control the market, or have that capacity,...

Online shops could offer each website customer a different price. Such personalised pricing can lead to advanced forms of price discrimination based on individual characteristics of consumers, which may be provided, obtained, or assumed. An online shop can recognise customers, for instance...

E-commerce is overshadowing face-to-face (F2F) transactions in business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce. This benefits consumers in providing more buying options, but may leave them with no remedies when purchases go awry. This chapter therefore discusses how online dispute resolution (ODR) systems...