Competition Law, Big Tech, and Financialisation

Abstract

In recent years, the competition law community has become absorbed in discussions around the dominance of the largest digital platform companies: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. Such discussions, for example about the meaning of power in the digital age, have helped to shift the field beyond its narrow focus on price and output effects. Yet, a crucial dimension is missing from the vast majority of commentary on competition law and the digital economy: the role of financialisation. Financialisation—understood as the hypertrophy and increased volatility of the financial sector, together with the reorientation of corporate governance around the principle of shareholder value maximisation—has important implications for the competitive strategies of the Big Tech companies, as well as who benefits from their economic power. Presenting quantitative findings on the corporate governance regimes of the Big Tech platforms, and drawing on insights from corporate law and heterodox economics, this chapter represents an attempt to integrate a financial capitalism perspective into the competition law analysis of digital markets.