The rise of the platform economy has been the subject of celebration and critique. Platform companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Postmates have been rightfully celebrated as positively disruptive, introducing much–needed competition in industries that have been otherwise over–mature and...

In March 2020, the membership of the European Law Institute adopted the ELI Model Rules on Online Platforms. These Model Rules are the result of a 5-year project during which a multinational working group drafted and developed rules for the relationship between online platforms and their users....

For the past twenty-five years, the U.S. Government has increasingly looked to antitrust—rather than regulation—to protect consumers in the Internet Ecosystem. There is a growing school of thought that an antitrust-only approach has failed and is ill-suited for the Internet Ecosystem. Reform...

Digital platforms facilitate interactions between consumers and merchants that allow collection of profiling information, which drives innovation and welfare. Private incentives, however, lead to information asymmetries resulting in market failures both on-platform, among merchants, and...

The proposed Digital Services Act (DSA) aims to place more responsibility on online platform operators to control information published by users on their websites. That is a welcome development in the light of scandals concerning fake news and the surreptitious influencing of voters through...

Can competition law also take into account effects on privacy or should privacy concerns of data-collecting behaviour only be dealt with by data protection law? In this paper we are analysing the German Facebook case, in which certain terms of service (that force consumers to give consent for...

Digital platforms operate in multisided markets providing services through the internet to two or more distinct groups of users, between which there are indirect network effects. Direct network effects are frequently present within each group. Therefore, online platforms usually present both...

Many online businesses, including most of the largest platforms, seek and provide attention. These online attention rivals provide products and features to obtain the attention of consumers and sell some of that attention, through other products and services, to merchants, developers and others...

The collection of user data by providers of online services recently has become a popular topic in debates about the application of competition policy to online markets. At issue is whether the collection of large amounts of data — sometimes referred to as “big data” — in particular data...

While online platforms are an enforcement priority for European competition authorities, the latter are only now turning their attention to app stores (after having scrutinized, among others, hotel booking websites, search engines and online marketplaces). However, app stores can be...