Updating Competition Policy for the Digital Economy? An Analysis of Recent Reports in Germany, UK, EU, and Australia

Abstract

All over the world a new critical discussion has emerged about the concentration tendencies in the digital economy and the market power of large digital firms and platforms, like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others. A particular important question is whether the current competition policies are capable of dealing with these new challenges or whether competition laws have to be amended or complemented by other new policies, e.g. regulatory solutions. This paper analyses four recent extensive reports about this question that were commissioned by the governments of Germany, UK, Australia, and the EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager (Schweitzer et al report, Furman report, ACCC report, Cremer et al report). In its analysis the paper focuses on the two topics “platforms, large digital firms, market power, and abusive behavior” and “data access/sharing/portability and the specific problems of digital IoT ecosystems”. An important result is that the reports largely agree on the severity of the market power and competition problems, but differ with regard to their main strategies how these problems should be solved.