Risks and opportunities in the coming era of online platform regulation

The unregulated era for the digital economy is coming to an end. Governments around the world are done studying digital markets and have moved on to crafting new antitrust laws and regulations that will reshape the relationship that exists between large online platforms and their business users, trading partners, and competitors. The big online platforms will face new legal risks, while the tech companies operating in their spheres of influence will see new legal protections and business opportunities. Everyone will need to keep up with a fast-changing legal landscape.

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Weekly Wrap-Up — Episode 12

This week’s episode is about how the antitrust laws are being used to try to rebalance the relationship between the large Big Tech online platforms and the business users who depend on them. I focus on the European Commission investigation of Amazon (surrounding third-party vendors) and France’s investigation of Google (surrounding web publishers).

Reining in Consumer Big Tech: Antitrust and Beyond

The U.S. House of Representatives recently released a long-anticipated report on the state of antitrust in consumer tech. It found that key gateways and highways online are heavily consolidated around a few Consumer Big Tech giants and that reforms of antitrust laws are needed to inject more competition into the internet.

But while the report’s recommendations are ambitious, they are not enough to take on all of the harmful effects to our culture, economy, and politics caused by consolidated consumer tech markets. One reason is that they do not tackle the law’s foundational shortcomings, which overly complicate the antitrust analysis and must be reformed. The other reason goes to the core of what modern competition laws are and what they are not, which requires looking beyond antitrust to other rules and regulations to rein in the broader societal consequences of bigness in the digital economy.

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