ICLE Submission to Digital Advertising Services Inquiry
The International Center for Law and Economics (ICLE) welcomes the opportunity to make a submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) Digital Advertising Services Inquiry. As a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center, ICLE works with academics around the world to promote scholarship into the intersection of law and economics.
The purpose of this submission is to highlight some of the findings of the relevant scholarship to help to inform the ACCC’s work, and to highlight some of the problems that may arise during the course of the study, given the misconceptions about competition between advertising-funded digital platforms that are common in the media and popular debate today.
This submission will focus on three areas raised by the Issues Paper: concentration of market power in digital advertising, unequal access to data acting as a potentially anti-competitive barrier to entry, and the effect of vertical integration on competition and innovation.