Is There a Consensus on Antitrust for the Big Tech?

Abstract

The European Commission and Competition Authorities of Germany, United Kingdom, France and Australia as well the Stigler Center of the University of Chicago have published major reports on competition policy in digital markets. The paper compares the approaches of these reports to identify consensus in characterizing these markets, identifying market failures and proposing policies and remedies for Digital Platforms (DPs). We identified nine areas of consensus using a maximum common denominator methodology. From merger control to platform and data interoperability, these reports explore the frontier of economics and law to underline the under-enforcement that has taken place across jurisdictions. There is a widespread dissatisfaction in the enforcement area, so the paper looks at several landmark cases to learn lessons for the future implementation of competition policy. We emphasize the large Transatlantic divide in enforcement of abuses of dominance between the US and EU and the fault lines in the US according to the administration. This shows that there is no consensus between the EU and US competition authorities. Regulatory measures have been proposed, and some have been implemented on data privacy and platform to business, sometimes in the intersection of competition policy with other policy areas, which shows the difficulty in partitioning public policies. But bringing them together is a challenge. None of the reports advocates deep structural measures, but there have been proposals by politicians and academics for the break-up of some of the big corporations of digital platforms, echoing past antitrust cases, mainly Microsoft. We discuss the pros and cons of this measure. Finally, we look at the way forward and further need to improve methodologies and processes of authorities to make them more agile and efficient.