Competition Law for the Digital Era: A Complex Systems’ Perspective

Regulating platforms and ecosystems: an introduction

“…"Financialization" has sped up the process still further, with the capital markets happy to confer astounding (and, some might argue, excessive) multiples on platform firms (Lianos et al, 2019b). Loss-makers like Uber, whose prospects remain unclear, still command valuations of over $50 billion.…”

“…As Big Tech broadened and deepened its reach, and its behaviors came to be seen as anticompetitive, excessive, and unfair, concerns grew. The year 2019 was a turning point, as four key reports appeared: one by the UK Treasury (Furman et al, 2019), one by the European Commission in the European Union (Crémer et al, 2019), one by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) competition authorities (Lianos et al, 2019b), and one by the Stigler Centre in the USA (Scott Morton et al, 2019). These paved the way for research that asked whether the entire regulatory edifice needed to be rebuilt (Lianos, 2019b).…”

“…The year 2019 was a turning point, as four key reports appeared: one by the UK Treasury (Furman et al, 2019), one by the European Commission in the European Union (Crémer et al, 2019), one by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) competition authorities (Lianos et al, 2019b), and one by the Stigler Centre in the USA (Scott Morton et al, 2019). These paved the way for research that asked whether the entire regulatory edifice needed to be rebuilt (Lianos, 2019b). This, in turn, heralded significant regulatory action, including the EU's Digital Services and Digital Markets Act (Jacobides et al, 2020a;Caffarra and Scott Morton, 2021) and US cases against Google and other Big Tech firms (see Jenny, 2021).…”

“…Thus began a fruitful collaboration that extended to applied policy work. 7 Building on Jacobides' work with the World Economic Forum on ecosystems (e.g., Jacobides et al, 2019), and leveraging Lianos' work for the BRICS competition authorities (Lianos et al, 2019b), we co-organized a workshop to focus on the challenges of regulating platforms. It was clear to us that the field would benefit from a truly interdisciplinary meeting of minds, where regulators, Big Tech executives, customer advocates, judges, heads of competition authorities from Europe (and Africa), antitrust practitioners, and leading scholars from Information Systems (IS), strategy, economics, law, and regulation would come together to better understand and advance our knowledge.…”

Ecosystems and competition law in theory and practice

“…However, since ecosystems also rest on interactions between independent firms, multiactor ecosystems also give rise to horizontal intra-ecosystem competition (between firms offering rivalrous, potentially substitute offerings within the same ecosystem) (Bourreau, 2020) and vertical intra-ecosystem competition, which refers to value captured through joint collaboration (between ecosystem participants, including the orchestrator). 2 Vertical intra-ecosystem competition falls in a blind spot of existing competition law (Lianos, 2019b) yet is at the core of contemporary concerns with platform orchestrators: Are, for instance, Apple's 30% fee from apps purchased on its app store and, more importantly, its ban of withinapp purchase standard commercial practices that we do not need to be concerned with or are they expressions of abuse of its complementors not only small but also large (Jacobides, 2021)? Some authors (e.g., Petit and Teece, 2021) are fairly relaxed about both interecosystem and intraecosystem competition issues, considering that the digital environment is inherently competitive, driven as it is by innovation and potential competition as opposed to "naked monopoly rents."…”