Big Data and Competition Policy

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Author : Maurice E. Stucke
Genre : Law

Summary : Big Data and Big Analytics are a big deal today. Big Data is playing a pivotal role in many companies' strategic decision-making. Companies are striving to acquire a 'data advantage' over rivals. Data-driven mergers are increasing. These data-driven business strategies and mergers raise significant implications for privacy, consumer protection and competition law. At the same time, European and United States' competition authorities are beginning to consider the implications of a data-driven economy on competition policy. In 2015, the European Commission launched a competition inquiry into the e-commerce sector and issued a statement of objections in its Google investigation. The implications of Big Data on competition policy will likely be a part of the mix. Big Data and Competition Policy is the first work to offer a detailed description of the important new issue of Big Data and explains how it relates to competition laws and policy, both in the EU and US. The book helps bring the reader quickly up to speed on what is Big Data, its competitive implications, the competition authorities' approach to data-driven mergers and business strategies, and their current approach's strengths and weaknesses. Written by two recognized leading experts in competition law, this accessible work offers practical guidance and theoretical discussion of the potential benefits (including data-driven efficiencies) and concerns for the practitioner, policy maker, and academic alike.

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Author : Maurice E. Stucke
Genre :

Summary : Big Data and Big Analytics are a big deal today. Big Data is playing a pivotal role in many companies' strategic decision-making. Companies are striving to acquire a 'data advantage' over rivals. Data-driven mergers are increasing. These data-driven business strategies and mergers raise significant implications for privacy, consumer protection and competition law. At the same time, European and United States' competition authorities are beginning to consider the implications of a data-driven economy on competition policy. In 2015, the European Commission launched a competition inquiry into the e-commerce sector and issued a statement of objections in its Google investigation. The implications of Big Data on competition policy will likely be a part of the mix. Big Data and Competition Policy is the first work to offer a detailed description of the important new issue of Big Data and explains how it relates to competition laws and policy, both in the EU and US. The book helps bring the reader quickly up to speed on what is Big Data, its competitive implications, the competition authorities' approach to data-driven mergers and business strategies, and their current approach's strengths and weaknesses. Written by two recognized leading experts in competition law, this accessible work offers practical guidance and theoretical discussion of the potential benefits (including data-driven efficiencies) and concerns for the practitioner, policy maker, and academic alike.

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Author : Alptekin Koksal
Genre : Law

Summary : Recent studies on competition law and digital markets reveal that accumulating personal information through data collection and acquisition methods benefits consumers considerably. Free of charge, fast and personalised services and products are offered to consumers online. Collected data is now an indispensable part of online businesses to the point that a new economy, a data-driven sector, has emerged. Many markets such as the social network, search engine, online advertising and e-commerce are regarded as data-driven markets in which the utilisation of Big Data is a requisite for the success of operations. However, the accumulation and use of data brings competition law concerns as they contribute to market power in the online world, resulting in a few technology giants gaining unprecedented market power due to the Big Data accumulation, indirect network effects and the creation of online ecosystems. As technology giants have billions of consumers worldwide, data-driven markets are truly global. In these data-driven markets, technology giants abuse their dominant positions, but existing competition law tools seem ineffective in addressing market power and assessing abusive behaviour related to Big Data. This book argues that a novel approach to the data-driven sector must be developed through the application of competition law rules to address this. It argues that current and potential conflicts can be mitigated by extending the competition law assessment beyond the current competition law tools to offer a modernised and unified approach to the Big Data–related competition issues. Promoting new legal tests for addressing the market power of technology giants and assessing abusive behaviour in data-driven markets, this book advocates for cooperation between competition and data protection authorities. It will be of interest to students, academics and practitioners with an interest in competition law and data protection.

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Author : Beata Mäihäniemi
Genre : Law

Summary : In this timely book, Beata Mäihäniemi analyses and evaluates how the characteristics of information as a good, as well as the characteristics of digital platforms, affect the application of competition law in both theory and practice.

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Author : Maurice E. Stucke
Genre : LAW

Summary : The first text to provide understanding of the important new issue of Big Data and how it relates to competition laws and policy, both in the EU and US.

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Author : Simonetta Vezzoso
Genre :

Summary : Big data is an important phenomenon injecting transformative effects into social and economic relationships. Consumers, firms and machines produce unprecedented amounts of data collected, stored and analysed by leveraging the synergic capabilities of mathematics, computer science and the Internet. With the full advent of the Internet of Things, even more data will be observed about, and inferred from, individuals' everyday activities and habits. The implied promise of big data is that it is increasingly possible to gain valuable insights out of unstructured data collected from different sources. Firms in many industries are increasingly using computer algorithms and big quantities of data to handle problems of analysis and prediction, from market intelligence to strategic management and automated decision-making. Acknowledging the growing potential for big data to have an immediate and direct impact on a broad range of human interactions, conversations within policy circles are starting to focus on how this phenomenon should factor into the competition policy framework itself. While big data can enhance competition, improve product offerings, and create a marketplace where resources are allocated more efficiently, the Chapter argues that competition policy designers and enforcers are bound to deal with unprecedented data-related challenges. The Chapter starts with a description of the big data value chain, highlights in particular how data collection, storage and analysis are driving many of the multisided business models of the digital economy, summarises some well-known peculiarities of data as an economic asset and sets the framework for the analysis of the effects of big data on competition processes. The Chapter concludes by drawing a few preliminary implications for competition policy. In particular, big data could have the effect of making collusion more prevalent, stable and difficult to detect, of reshaping traditional relationships within a vertical supply chain by increasing forms of dependency and potentially restraining inter-platform competition and users behaviour, of increasing market concentration, and, finally, of enabling further abuses of market power.

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Author : ZOBOLI LAURA
Genre : Law

Summary : This book constitutes the final output of the COMP.EU.TER Project (Public and Private Enforcement of EU Competition Law in the Age of Big Data), cofunded by the Training of National Judges Programme of the European Union (GA HT.6149 SI2.858159). Over two years, the COMP.EU.TER Project provided training to national judges and apprentice judges on the enforcement of EU competition law in the digital era. Training activities were organized by the Universities of Turin, Milan and Genoa in the form of seminars, lectures and online materials made available on the project’s e-learning platform (www.compeuter.unito.it). In addition, the project benefitted from a wider network of associated partners (the Universities of Antwerp, Ferrara, Aberdeen, Rotterdam, Warsaw and Zaragoza) which contributed by providing materials for the COMP.EU.TER e-learning platform and promoting the training activities among the respective national judiciaries. On 30th November and 1st December 2023, the Final Conference of the COMP.EU.TER Project was held at the Palazzo di Giustizia in Milan, which houses both the Court of Milan and the Court of Appeal of Milan. Over two days, the speakers addressed a selected audience of national judges from over ten Member States, tackling the most relevant developments in the public and private enforcement of EU competition law in the context of digital markets. The aim of the COMP.EU.TER Project has been, primarily, to raise the awareness of national judges about the challenges posed by the application to the digital world of traditional competition law concepts developed in the “analogic” world. Not only do the big data revolution and the up-surging diffusion of data analytics facilitate the commission of existing antitrust violations, but they also originate new types of anti-competitive behaviours that could not be committed in the analogic world (e.g. algorithmic collusion, behavioural discrimination). In addi-tion, the structure and the dynamics of digital markets put traditional tools of competition law enforcement under strain, increasing the bur-den of both administrative authorities and courts. Against this backdrop, the COMP.EU.TER Project has sought to bet-ter prepare national judges for the task of enforcing EU competition law in digital markets, by helping them familiarise with the most recent legis-lation, case law and practice. The book shares this goal, and its primary targets are national judges dealing with competition law in the courts of the Member States. We hope that the book may guide them in this diffi-cult task, in a context where profound transformations in technology, market structure and regulatory landscape present the enforcers with unprecedented challenges. For similar reasons, we expect it to provide useful insights to legal practitioners and academics interested in understanding the way EU competition law is and will be applied to digital markets.