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Disruptive Technologies and Competition Law

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New Developments in Competition Law and Economics

Part of the book series: Economic Analysis of Law in European Legal Scholarship ((EALELS,volume 7))

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Abstract

Technologies can change societies but also law designing the rules for living together. If technological developments go fast and deep, even disruptive effects are possible. The digitization of the last 20 years had an impact on the markets and on competition law in various respects. In a first phase online transactions became feasible. Data ownership and privacy as new values further impacted the antitrust parameters environment in a second phase. The most disruptive effects, however, have been caused by the recent and newest technologies, namely the new infrastructures (distributed ledger technologies) as well as by algorithms and artificial intelligence. The contribution outlines the developments and particularly discusses the major challenges to which competition law is exposed in the present technological environment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an early general overview of the online markets see Weber (2013), pp. 1 et seqq.

  2. 2.

    Graef (2015), pp. 487/88.

  3. 3.

    Indeed the phenomenon of two-sided markets is not as new as acknowledged by some scholars.

  4. 4.

    Haucap and Heimeshof (2013), p. 3.

  5. 5.

    OECD (2018).

  6. 6.

    Weber (2013), p. 2.

  7. 7.

    In two-sidedonline markets some services are typically offered free of charge to users (see Sect. 2.4 below).

  8. 8.

    Haucap and Heimeshof (2013), p. 3.

  9. 9.

    Weber (2013), p. 3.

  10. 10.

    Whish and Bailey (2018), p. 189, p. 213 and p. 220.

  11. 11.

    See also Weber (2011), pp. 51 et seqq.

  12. 12.

    Weber (2013), pp. 3–4.

  13. 13.

    Edlin and Harris (2013), p. 9.

  14. 14.

    Edlin and Harris (2013), p. 9.

  15. 15.

    Weber (2013), p. 4.

  16. 16.

    Acquisti et al. (2016).

  17. 17.

    Weber (2014), p. 175.

  18. 18.

    Weber (2013), p. 4.

  19. 19.

    Geradin and Kuschewsky (2013).

  20. 20.

    Graef (2015), pp. 487–488.

  21. 21.

    See below Sect. 3.1.

  22. 22.

    See also Weber (2013), p. 5.

  23. 23.

    See also Weber (2013), p. 5.

  24. 24.

    For a general overview of the relations between big data analyses and competition law see Ezrachi and Stucke (2016), pp. 11 et seqq.

  25. 25.

    Thouvenin et al. (2017), pp. 125 et seqq.

  26. 26.

    Weber (2017a), p. 150.

  27. 27.

    World Economic Forum (2011), p. 14; for a more detailed explanation see World Economic Forum (2014), pp. 16 et seqq.

  28. 28.

    For further details see Weber and Thouvenin (2018), pp. 54–55.

  29. 29.

    Rubinstein (2013), p. 81; Tene and Polonetsky (2013), pp. 263 et seqq.

  30. 30.

    Weber (2017a), pp. 152–153.

  31. 31.

    Weber (2017a), p. 153.

  32. 32.

    See below Sect. 3.2 and Weber (2016), pp. 66 et seqq.

  33. 33.

    Weber (2014), pp. 174–175; Weber (2016), p. 63.

  34. 34.

    COM(2015) 634 final (December 9, 2015).

  35. 35.

    Monopolkommission (2015), p. 201.

  36. 36.

    Kilian (2012), p. 173.

  37. 37.

    Weber (2014), pp. 177–178; Weber (2016), p. 63.

  38. 38.

    Reference to the problems in case of developing viable regulations is also made by Capobianco and Gonzaga (2017), p. 6.

  39. 39.

    Weber (2014), p. 182.

  40. 40.

    Weber (2014), pp. 178–179.

  41. 41.

    Weber (2016), pp. 66 et seqq.

  42. 42.

    Rolf H. Weber and Florent Thouvenin, Rechtsgutachten zuhanden des Bundesamters für Justiz, Möglichkeit der Einführung eines Datenportabilitätsrechts im schweizerischen Recht und zur Rechtslage bei Personal Information Management Systems (PIMS), 22. Dezember 2017, verfügbar https://www.bakom.admin.ch/bakom/de/home/digital-und-internet/big-data.html.

  43. 43.

    Weber (2017b), nos. 23 et seqq.

  44. 44.

    For a general overview see Ezrachi and Stucke (2016), pp. 35 et seqq.; OECD (2017a), pp. 18 et seqq.; OECD (2017b), pp. 16 et seqq.

  45. 45.

    OECD et al. (2017), pp. 3–4.

  46. 46.

    OECD et al. (2017), pp. 4–5.

  47. 47.

    Petit (2017), p. 362.

  48. 48.

    For a more detailed overview see Ezrachi and Stucke (2017), pp. 1781 et seqq.; Ezrachi and Stucke (2016), pp. 39 et seqq.

  49. 49.

    Ezrachi and Stucke (2017), pp. 1784–1787.

  50. 50.

    Ezrachi and Stucke (2017), pp. 1787–1789.

  51. 51.

    Ezrachi and Stucke (2017), pp. 1789–1794.

  52. 52.

    Ezrachi and Stucke (2017), pp. 1795–1808.

  53. 53.

    OECD et al. (2017), p. 29.

  54. 54.

    For further details see OECD et al. (2017), pp. 27 et seqq.

  55. 55.

    OECD et al. (2017), pp. 32–33 and 34.

  56. 56.

    US Association for Computing Machinery.

  57. 57.

    See also Heinemann and Gebicka (2016), p. 440; Picht and Freund (2018), pp. 5–8.

  58. 58.

    See art. 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

  59. 59.

    Heinemann and Gebicka (2016), p. 439.

  60. 60.

    Harrington and Harker (2017).

  61. 61.

    OECD (2017a), pp. 36–39; OECD (2017b), pp. 35–37.

  62. 62.

    OECD et al. (2017), p. 23.

  63. 63.

    OECD et al. (2017), p. 30.

  64. 64.

    OECD et al. (2017), pp. 33–34; Capobianco and Gonzaga (2017), pp. 5–6.

  65. 65.

    OECD (2017b), p. 43.

  66. 66.

    Vestagher (2017).

  67. 67.

    Ezrachi and Stucke (2017), p. 1801.

  68. 68.

    Ezrachi and Stucke (2017), pp. 1799 and 1806.

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Acknowledgment

This contribution benefitted from valuable comments by Dr. Alfred Früh, Postdoctoral Researcher and Managing Director of the Center for Information Technology, Society, and Law at the University of Zurich.

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  1. Faculty of Law, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Rolf H. Weber

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Correspondence to Rolf H. Weber .

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  1. Faculty of Law, University of Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland

    Klaus Mathis

  2. The School of Law, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Avishalom Tor

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Weber, R.H. (2019). Disruptive Technologies and Competition Law. In: Mathis, K., Tor, A. (eds) New Developments in Competition Law and Economics. Economic Analysis of Law in European Legal Scholarship, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11611-8_11

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