Digital markets and multi-sided platforms are created by the internet, that are characterized by the use of big data as new market power. Big data enabled dominant and digital-based key players such as Instagram and Facebook/Meta to record and forecast their users’ personal data and spending capacity to increase their economies of scale by tailoring updates to the users’ demand. Therefore, big data becomes an essential market share, and its scarcity determines newer entrants’ ability to enter the market and the existing incumbents’ ability to survive by grappling with fast-paced digital changes. This legal morphology benefits data-driven undertakings to elevate their position in the market and achieve enough independence to influence market behavior. On the other hand, multi-sided platforms refer to where a single undertaking sells different products to different types of consumers on different sides of the platforms that affect each other’s demand due to the cross-group network effect. Undertakings often sell zero-price products to one side while imposing the monetary burden and gaining revenue from the other. This situation triggered legal challenges to the calculation of market share necessary to determine a dominant position that is essentially mathematical based. Furthermore, big data and multi-sided platforms stimulate the rise of novel abusive practices in the digital market. This paper will analyze the Indonesian 1999 competition law’s flexibility to deal with these changes by comparing the existing framework on consumer data protection, big data, and multi-sided platforms management to the European Union competition law.
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