In this instructive post ‘The Antitrust Quagmire‘, Frederic Filloux exposes how current laws and regulations about antitrust may not be adapted to the situation of the GAFA digital players. As a result, the Collaborative Age requires a new approach to the antitrust situation.
His arguments revolve around four topics:
- internet time is much faster than traditional legal process time which spans over years, giving the opportunity for digital players to render cases obsolete before they are judged,
- a difficulty to determine exactly the market and competitors of interest, due to the cross-sectional approach of the digital disruption,
- another difficult in the physical world when it comes to compare e-commerce with traditional commerce, and the fact that e-commerce provides a selling avenue to many small, independent producers that would not be available otherwise,
- the fact that possible measures and compensations can’t easily be the same that presided in the geographical or product division of Standard Oil or AT&T – in particular because value is in the network effect.
Thus a new antitrust approach is required that is adapted to the digital universe of the Collaborative Age. It is needed to prevent too powerful private players to take decisions that border on national sovereignty. What could it look like? It is a bit unclear at the moment, however a quicker bit-sized approach as promoted by Frederic Filloux may be the answer.
Antitrust approach to digital players in the Collaborative Age should be one the major research areas in business law at the moment, and innovation will be required.
