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Popular Media The Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) is a complex piece of regulation. It includes some great ideas (as tackling predatory innovation) while being surprisingly conservative (defined as “?the wish to . . .
The Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) is a complex piece of regulation. It includes some great ideas (as tackling predatory innovation) while being surprisingly conservative (defined as “?the wish to resist great or sudden change” by the Oxford Dictionary).
Read the full piece here.
TL;DR Some U.S. antitrust advocates, including members of Congress, recently have advocated the United States adopt a more European approach to antitrust policy.
Some U.S. antitrust advocates, including members of Congress, recently have advocated the United States adopt a more European approach to antitrust policy. This comes as the European Commission itself is proposing a Digital Markets Act (DMA) that would impose new regulations on Big Tech platforms and ban many forms of conduct outright.
Europe’s economies are less innovative, less dynamic, and ultimately, significantly poorer than the United States. Europe’s technology markets, in particular, are relatively stagnant. Regulating them directly is likely to make Europe’s problems with innovation worse, and would serve as a poor model for the United States to follow.
Read the full explainer here.
Scholarship Unlike many other trading blocs (most notably the EU), the ASEAN nations are yet to agree upon a common, unified set of competition law provisions. . . .
Unlike many other trading blocs (most notably the EU), the ASEAN nations are yet to agree upon a common, unified set of competition law provisions. Nevertheless, recent years have seen the ASEAN members embark upon various initiatives that seek to harmonize their competition regimes (though these stop well short of common rules). In 2016, for instance, the member states adopted the ASEAN Competition Action Plan (“ACAP”). Among other things, the plan seeks to ensure that all ASEAN states implement competition regimes that meet a set of minimal standards, and eventually to harmonize competition policy across the ASEAN region.
These ongoing efforts to modernize and harmonize ASEAN competition laws do not arise in a vacuum. Rather, they take place amid a longstanding effort by both the European Union and the United States to export their respective competition laws throughout the world:
The EU and the US . . . want the rest of the world to follow their respective regulatory models. Both jurisdictions have actively promoted their competition laws as “best practices” abroad, urging developed and developing countries alike to adopt domestic competition laws and build institutions to enforce them. They promote their models through a specialized network of competition regulators—the International Competition Network (ICN)—and also more general bodies—notably the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They also employ bilateral tools in their promotion effort—including offering technical assistance to emerging competition law jurisdictions. In its trade agreements, the EU also explicitly conditions access to its markets on the adoption of a competition law, exporting its own law in the process, while the US relies primarily in its persuasive powers rather than on formal treaties in exporting its laws.
No doubt the EU and US competition regimes are the most developed and dominant exemplars; following the policies of one or both to some extent is virtually inevitable. But this raises a critical question: should the ASEAN countries attempt to mimic the competition regimes of other developed nations, notably those that are in force in the EU and the US? And, if so, which one of these regimes should they draw more inspiration from?
While we certainly do not purport to know what type of regime would best fit the idiosyncratic needs of the ASEAN countries, we seek to dispel the myth that the European model of competition enforcement would necessarily provide a superior blueprint. To the contrary, we show that the evolutionary, common-law-like regime that has emerged in the US has many strengths that are often overlooked by contemporary competition policy scholarship, and which might provide a particularly good fit for the economic and political realities of the ASEAN member states.
Our paper also falls squarely within a much broader debate. Over the past couple of years, there have been renewed calls for policymakers to reform existing competition regimes in order to better address the challenges that are, purportedly, posed by the emergence of the digital economy. This has notably resulted in a series of high-profile reports, papers, and draft legislation, concluding that more interventionist tools are required to effectively deal with competition issues in digital markets. The draft European Digital Markets Act, the US House Judiciary report on competition in digital markets, as well as the draft bill put forward by US Senator Amy Klobuchar all mark the culmination of this antitrust reform movement.
Although the connection is often implicit, these calls for reform ultimately seek to implement (and amplify) features that are currently at the forefront of European competition enforcement. Potential reforms thus include broadening the goals of competition policy, as well as relying more heavily on structural and behavioral presumptions (rather than outcome-oriented reasoning).
At times this desire to move closer to the EU model is more explicit. For example, writing in Vox, Matthew Yglesias ventured that “[o]ne idea [for remedying perceived problems with US antitrust] would be for the US to actually move to something more like the European system and abandon the consumer welfare standard.” In a similar vein, Bloomberg featured an article by economics writer Noah Smith heaping praise on the growing populist antitrust wave and its potential to roll back the consumer welfare standard. And, at least according to EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, the US executive branch agencies have expressed a “renewed deeper interest and curiosity as to what we are doing in Europe.”
In parallel to these calls for reform, scholars have also analyzed the evolution of competition legislation around the world (as well as regulation, more generally). These scholars observe that recent initiatives have tended to mimic the rules of the European Union, rather than the more laissez faire approach that is often associated with the US. This trend has been referred to as the “Brussels Effect.” Accordingly, these scholars predict a regulatory “race to the top”, where more stringent rules and regulations will become the norm. While ostensibly agnostic, this implicitly conveys a sense that “resistance is futile,” and that the European approach will inevitably continue to spread more rapidly than its US counterpart.
With these policy debates in mind, our paper argues that ASEAN member states should not be too quick to embrace the European model of competition enforcement – be it by adopting more expansive competition laws or by regulating competition in digital markets. While the above-referenced scholars and advocates tend to assert that a more-expansive, EU-oriented approach would improve economic conditions, economic logic and the apparent reality from Europe strongly suggest otherwise.
Antitrust is an attractive regulatory tool for a number of reasons. The vague, terse language of most antitrust laws (including those in both the US and EU) readily lend themselves to “interpretation” imbuing them with virtually limitless scope. Indeed, the urge to treat antitrust as a legal Swiss Army knife capable of correcting all manner of social and economic ills is apparently difficult to resist. Conflating size with market power, and market power with political power, many recent calls for regulation of the tech industry are framed in antitrust terms, even though they are mostly rooted in nothing recognizable as modern, economically informed antitrust legal claims or analysis.
But that attraction is precisely why everyone—and emerging economies like ASEAN members in particular—should care about the scope, process, and economics of antitrust and the extent of its politicization. Antitrust in the US has largely resisted the relentless effort to politicize it. Despite being rooted in vague and potentially expansive statutory language, US antitrust is economically grounded, evolutionary, and limited to a set of achievable social welfare goals. In the EU, by contrast, these sorts of constraints are far weaker.
This conclusion is in no way altered by the fact that US antitrust law has become the “outlier” of global antitrust enforcement, compared to the EU’s more “consensual” approach. What matters is a policy’s actual results, not whether it is widely adopted; the world is full of debunked beliefs that were once widely shared. And it is far from certain that the widespread adoption of the EU model is in any way indicative of superior results. It is equally (or even more) plausible that this model has proliferated because it naturally accommodates politically useful populist narratives—such as “big is bad,” robin hood fallacies and robber baron myths—that are constrained by the US’s more evidence based and rational antitrust decision-making. America’s isolation might thus be a testament to its success rather than an emblem of its failure.
The EU’s more aggressive pursuit of technology platforms under its antitrust laws demonstrates many of the problems with its approach in general. Endorsing the European approach to antitrust, in a naïve attempt to bring high-profile cases against large internet platforms, would prioritize political expediency over the rule of law. It would open the floodgates of antitrust litigation and facilitate deleterious tendencies, such as non-economic decision-making, rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and politically motivated enforcement.
Bringing international antitrust enforcement in line with that of the EU would thus unlock a veritable Pandora’s box of concerns that might otherwise be kept in check. Chief among them is the use of antitrust laws to evade democratically and judicially established rules and legal precedent. When considering this question, it is important to see beyond any particular set of firms that enforcement officials and politicians may currently be targeting. An antitrust law expanded to consider the full scope of soft concerns that the EU aims at will not be employed against only politically disfavored companies, companies in other jurisdictions, or in order to expediently “solve” otherwise political problems. Once antitrust is expanded beyond its economic constraints and imbued with political content, it ceases to be a uniquely valuable tool for addressing real economic harms to consumers, and becomes a tool for routing around legislative and judicial constraints.
Our paper proceeds as follows. Section II analyzes the high-level differences between the American and European approaches to competition policy. Notably, this Section shows that these regimes pursue different goals, rely to varying degrees on economic insights to inform their decision-making, afford very different degrees of judicial deference to antitrust authorities, and exhibit different degrees of politization. Section III shows that the US and Europe also differ substantially in terms of the conduct that may constitute an infringement of competition law—the EU system being significantly more restrictive. Section IV turns to question of competition in digital platform markets. It argues that European competition enforcement in the digital industry provides a cautionary tale that cuts against both the adoption of ex ante regulation and a relaxation of existing antitrust standards (such as the “consumer welfare standard”). Section V posits that reducing economic concentration—sometimes cited as a byproduct of European-style competition enforcement—should not be a self-standing goal of antitrust policy. Finally, Section VI argues that many of the economic and political characteristics of the ASEAN economy cut in favor of using the US model of competition enforcement as a blueprint for further development and harmonization of ASEAN competition law.
Read the full white paper here.
TL;DR The process of writing and passing laws in the European Union primarily involves three institutions: the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council of the EU. The Commission proposes legislation, and the Parliament and the Council approve, amend, or reject it.
The process of writing and passing laws in the European Union primarily involves three institutions: the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council of the EU. The Commission proposes legislation, and the Parliament and the Council approve, amend, or reject it.
The Parliament is the EU’s legislature. It represents all EU citizens and is directly elected by them. The Council of the European Union represents the governments of the individual member states. The European Commission is the EU’s politically independent executive body responsible for drawing up proposals for new European legislation and ensuring, together with the Court of Justice, that these laws are properly applied by member states. It consists of one commissioner from each member state, for a total of 27.
TL;DR The European Union has unveiled draft legislation that seeks to tame so-called “gatekeeper” Big Tech firms. If passed into law, this Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) would create a list of “dos and don’ts” by which the platforms must abide, such as allowing interoperability with third parties and sharing data with rivals.
The European Union has unveiled draft legislation that seeks to tame so-called “gatekeeper” Big Tech firms. If passed into law, this Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) would create a list of “dos and don’ts” by which the platforms must abide, such as allowing interoperability with third parties and sharing data with rivals. In short, the DMA would give the European Commission significant powers to tell tech companies how to run their businesses.
The DMA essentially shifts competition enforcement against gatekeeper platforms away from an “effects” analysis that weighs costs and benefits to a “blacklist” approach that proscribes all listed practices as harmful. This will constrain platforms’ ability to experiment with new products and make changes to existing ones, limiting their ability to innovate and compete.
Popular Media If passed into law, this Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) would fundamentally alter the way these platforms conduct business in Europe. But European Commission officials have been so . . .
If passed into law, this Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) would fundamentally alter the way these platforms conduct business in Europe. But European Commission officials have been so preoccupied with how to regulate Big Tech that they never stopped to consider whether they should. Indeed, these new rules could have unintended consequences that hamper digital markets in the EU.
ICLE White Paper There is a danger that the UK is heading for a significant and potentially damaging overhaul of its competition policy on the basis of thin evidence, rushed analysis, and no attempt to measure the costs, benefits and risks of the approach being undertaken.
There is a danger that the UK is heading for a significant and potentially damaging overhaul of its competition policy on the basis of thin evidence, rushed analysis, and no attempt to measure the costs, benefits and risks of the approach being undertaken. The fact that the Digital Markets Taskforce consultation period was only one month is itself an example of this – one month is an unreasonably short period of time if the consultation was being taken seriously, and suggests that instead it is merely window-dressing to give procedural cover to whatever the government plans on doing anyway.
This would be a mistake. The two main documents that have led to the creation of the Digital Markets Taskforce, the Furman Report and the CMA’s digital advertising market study, do not provide strong justifications for the changes they propose, which are sweeping. Neither of them consider the trade-offs involved with the interventions they propose in any serious detail, let alone attempt to measure them quantitatively, yet these trade-offs and risks – lower investment, reduced competition, less innovation, fewer startups being founded in the UK, and worse productivity growth for the UK over the years ahead – are potentially enormous, and could weaken the UK’s technology sector.
Read the full paper here.
A growing number of companies operate on a global scale attracting the scrutiny of multiple competition law authorities around the world. As some of the . . .
A growing number of companies operate on a global scale attracting the scrutiny of multiple competition law authorities around the world. As some of the largest and most developed antitrust jurisdictions in the world, the US and the EU are often looked upon as influential authorities on competition law standards and approaches. They do not always agree, but they are not necessarily as divergent as it is sometime suggested in the literature. This conference will discuss the relationship between the two jurisdictions.
To examine these issues the conference will bring together academics, practitioners, and regulators from the EU and the US. It will consist of four panels, one of which will be structured as a moderated conversation among current and former enforcers from the US and Europe:
The conference will take place at the School of Law, University of Leeds from 9.15am until 5.15pm on 15 September 2017.
The conference is free but registration is required on Eventbrite.
This full-day conference is jointly organised and funded by the Centre for Business Law and Practice (CLBP) at the School of Law and the International Center for Law and Economics (ICLE) in Portland, OR, USA.
The CPBL is a leading research centre based at the School of Law, University of Leeds. Its expertise includes corporate and financial law, commercial and consumer law and, competition/antitrust law. It is large and well-established, with over 20 academic members, half of which are professors. Its members have established international reputations in the broad field of business law, and in particular in corporate and financial law.
The International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) is a nonprofit, non-partisan research center. Working with a roster of more than fifty academic affiliates and research centers from around the globe, ICLE develops and disseminates targeted academic output to build the intellectual foundation for rigorous, economically-grounded policy.
The conference will be preceded by Professor Pinar Akman’s Inaugural Lecture, which will take place at 5.00pm on 14 September 2017 at the School of Law, University of Leeds. Additional registration for the Inaugural Lecture is required; it can be done on a different Eventbrite page to that for the conference itself. To register for the Inaugural Lecture please click here.
The School of Law, University of Leeds is accredited by the Bar Standards Board to provide CPD for barristers at the Bar of England & Wales. The conference is accredited with 7 CPD hours for barristers at the Bar of England & Wales. We are willing to confirm the attendance of solicitors for CPD purposes on their individual CPD records.
Location Details
Moot Court Room, Liberty Building, School of Law, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT (download map).
There is limited car-parking available on campus on a first come, first serve basis.
If you require help with registration or finding us, please contact Ms Lucie Milner ([email protected]). For any other questions please contact Professor Peter Whelan ([email protected]).
Slides
Dr Hedvig Schmidt, University of Southampton – Fantastic Beasts and How to Deal with Them Under the Competition Rules
Professor Koren Wong-Ervin, Global Antitrust Institute – Standard-Essential Patent and FRAND: The International Landscape
Professor Salil Mehra, Temple University – Robo-Selling, Big Data and Antitrust’s Error-Cost Framework
Regulatory Comments The Commission’s interest in protecting the privacy of its citizens is commendable.
The Commission’s interest in protecting the privacy of its citizens is commendable. This concern, however, should be well tempered by humility, and the Commission’s ultimate decision should be guided by the understanding that contemporary technology and market innovations have afforded consumers a degree of choice unparallelled in the history of the European Union. While some firms may build their products with the requirement that consumers allow them to use personal information, others will not. And when consumers defect from products that do not meet their individual mix of privacy, price, and other preferences, firms will take notice and change their behavior accordingly.
This leads to another related point: innovation moves so quickly today that uniform prescriptive regulation intended to govern the behavior of many thousands of firms and millions of consumers is doomed to frustration if not outright failure. Moreover, broad regulations meant to bring industry to heel frequently work to the benefit of incumbents, driving out smaller competitors or making entry nearly impossible, only further narrowing consumer choices and guaranteeing less than optimal results for all of society.
With that said, there are certainly actions for the Commission to take that ensure a competitive environment in which consumer interests are adequately protected. Chief among these areas would be to enact regulations that control the damaging effects of costly data localization rules. Overall, however, the Commission would do best to leave much of the implementation of privacy regulations to the individual EU members who are most in touch with the challenges and desires of their own constituents.
