Post by account_disabled on Mar 12, 2024 3:24:18 GMT -6
SpaccaOne of the biggest challenges facing competition law in today's world, dominated by technology companies with great market power in each of the segments in which they operate, is refining the concepts and tools used to prevent and combat antitrust offenses.
The recent investigation of Google promoted by the US Ministry of Justice, which accuses the company of conduct aimed at ensuring its exclusivity in several services, in order to maintain its dominant position in the search provider market, is very important to revive the policy of combating monopolies and anti-competitive practices that had been losing steam for a long time due to the consolidation of the postulates of the Chicago School in the jurisprudence of the courts and in the analysis guides and administrative routines of the competition authorities. In a way, the case echoes the one brought against Microsoft some twenty years ago. There are no specificities of the digital era, as the aim is to prevent behaviors that threaten free competition. 1
However, there are already several procedures and decisions by antitrust authorities that have as their object not only competition law, but the digital economy and the intensive Portugal Mobile Number List use of data mining collected at high speed from a large number of sources of various types ( big data ). Most services in the digital economy are offered on platforms that operate according to a multi-sided market model, such as social networks, payment cards, search engines, transport and accommodation applications, between others.
In two-sided markets, such as credit cards, compensation is paid by both the merchant and the holder. In multi-sided markets, such as social networks, it has been common not to charge the user, which does not mean that the service is free, as advertisers certainly pass on the cost of advertising to the final price of their products, just as users offer in exchange for something of value, your personal data. Advertisers, moreover, prefer platforms with as many users as possible.
Network effects encourage the concentration of markets, making it difficult for new entrants with a small number of users to establish themselves, which helps explain the proliferation of digital markets with a dominant or near-monopolistic company. The acts of concentration and conduct of these companies must be analyzed with special care, as antitrust authorities use the criterion of consumer well-being measured by the effects of the concentration or conduct on prices in the short term, which makes a qualitative analysis difficult. the measurement of market power.
In digital markets, however, it seems clear that the company's ability to collect, process and treat data must be a central element in determining its market power. There are, of course, those who understand that data, due to the ease of collection, its ubiquity and its non-exclusive and non-rival nature, cannot be taken into account to measure market power. In the opposite sense, it can be argued that consumers are faced with great informational asymmetry that makes their choices difficult, a problem magnified by the cognitive bias of the so-called limited rationality and by the fact that the primary competence to implement and supervise public policies for the protection of personal data belongs to the authorities established for this purpose, based on different principles and rules.
In Europe, there are already some examples of merger control, in which data protection was taken into account. In the acquisition of DoubleClick by Google, the possibility that the combination of databases could harm consumers was discussed, but the European Commission limited the analysis to the postulates of antitrust law and approved the operation.
In the purchase of Whatsapp by Facebook, also approved, three relevant markets were defined: a) communication services; b) social networks and c) online advertising. The Commission recognized the importance of data protection as a parameter, but understood that it did not have the competence to monitor such aspects. The analysis was limited to the possibility that the concentration of data increased Facebook's market power in the online advertising segment.
In the Asnef/Equifax case, the EU Court of Justice stated that the protection of personal data falls outside the scope of competition law. When examining Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn, the European Commission, however, reaffirmed that privacy is a decisive parameter in markets where data prevails ( data-driven markets ).