A frequent starting point of the ongoing debates on a future platform regulation – in the EU in the form of a “Digital Markets Act” (DMA) – is the alleged ineffectiveness of competition law enforcement in the digital realm, and in particular when it comes to “abuse of domi-nance” or...

Platform businesses have been pivotal in the rise of the digital economy. Amazon is one example of a platform taking on the role of a quasi-regulator; an entity that is able to determine the terms of interaction on the platform. This intermediary position entails the danger of anti-competitive...

In recent years, several competition authorities around the world have announced majorinvestigations into potential anti-competitive behaviour by digital platforms. Not all ofthat behaviour harms downstream consumers. This has contributed to a growing ‘existentialcrisis’ at the foundation of...

The Discussion Paper, intended to guide the ACCC toward the recommendations in the ongoing Digital Platform Services Inquiry, suggests consideration of a wide variety of sweeping changes in Australian competition-law enforcement and the enactment of additional regulations in regard to social...

The regulation of digital platforms is frequently framed as a legal and institutional trade-off. Should policy makers “regulate” or should they “break-up” Big Tech? Should they decentralize digital power or should they transform companies like Google into accountable bottlenecks? These...

Digital platforms such as Amazon Marketplace or Google Search are commercial and political actors. They have taken center-stage as new spaces for exchange. They facilitate digitally networked interactions and transactions between different customer groups through algorithms, data, and other...

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...

A consensus is emerging around the world about the need for policymakers to address certain characteristics and competitive tendencies that are generated by digital platforms or digital ecosystems, with a view to reforming the public policy instruments currently in place so that they are fit for...

This paper contains our personal observations on the CMA's Interim Report on its Market Study on Online platforms and digital advertising (the “Interim Report”). As a starting point, we are very impressed by the quality of the Interim Report as it correctly identifies the competition issues...

This note provides some comments on the nature of competition among digital platforms (mainly the GAFA), which will be qualified as ‘co-opetition’, to reflect the complementarity of services offered and fierce rivalry among the platforms in their strategies of vertical integration. The main...