| | |
|
BalajiVenkatakrishnanFirstEssay 5 - 08 Oct 2019 - Main.BalajiVenkatakrishnan
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
Antitrust as a short-term vehicle to combat the Big Data Conundrum?
-- By BalajiVenkatakrishnan - 07 Oct 2019 | |
<
< | The advent of digitalization and data analytics has transcended the traditional understanding of markets and their regulation. Data-driven business models have become crucial to gain competitive advantages, such that 79.4% of participants in a survey feared displacement by competitors with ‘data cultures’. Such concerns have prompted regulators to contemplate data’s impact on competition. However, regulators in India remain unresponsive to this emerging challenge. In this essay, I aim to identify global experiences in the competition and data intersection that may provide meaningful lessons for India. | >
> | The advent of digitalization and data analytics has transcended the traditional understanding of markets and their regulation. Data-driven business models have become crucial to gain efficiencies, and create customer benefits, but have also been deployed to gain competitive advantages and market power. The latter could result in competition foreclosure, exclusionary practices, and several other anti-consumer effects. In fact, 79.4% of participants in a survey feared displacement by competitors with ‘data cultures’. This is extremely concerning, as the game of big data capitalism is in any case dominated by few companies like Facebook and Google. Further, the penumbra and domino effects of data-driven technologies on the economy and every stakeholder in society has left legislatures around the world struggling to devise comprehensive regulations.
Such concerns have prompted regulators to contemplate data’s impact on competition. However, regulators in India remain unresponsive to this emerging challenge. In this essay, I aim to identify global experiences in the competition and data intersection that may provide meaningful lessons for India. | | | Global Experiences | |
<
< | Data analytics helps companies achieve economic efficiencies and create consumer benefits. Conversely, companies strive to acquire data to gain market power, which could foreclose competition, or lead to collusive and exclusionary practices. Thus, regulators struggle balancing pro-competitive effects and anti-competitive conduct, as they are traditionally price-centric in evaluating markets while data is difficult to value. | >
> | Data analytics helps . Conversely, companies strive to acquire data to gain market power, which could foreclose competition, or lead to collusive and exclusionary practices. Thus, regulators struggle balancing pro-competitive effects and anti-competitive conduct, as they are traditionally price-centric in evaluating markets while data is difficult to value. | | | However, increasing number of data-related transactions have made regulators deviate from conventional methods to evaluate and ensure data’s minimal impact on competition. For instance, in 2014, the European Commission (EC) analysed whether Facebook could use WhatsApp? as a data source to augment its position in advertising (post-acquisition) and noted an absence of competition concerns, as Google dominated data collection. This significantly contributed to the development of the competition and data intersection, as the possibility of defining markets solely based on data was recognised. Nevertheless, the analysis was limited and ignored privacy-concerns consumers could experience as a potential competition issue. |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |