Access and Interoperability and Antitrust
Many of you will have seen a lecture I’ve given on several occasions since around 2011 when I discuss antitrust issues around interoperability. My basic concern is that the competition rules – and I’m thinking in particular of the EU’s 2004 Microsoft Decision and the 2007 General Court upholding of that decision – see interoperability as a refusal to supply / essential facility issue. For reasons I explore in the lecture I think that’s the wrong frame of reference. More fundamentally, I’m uncomfortable with a heuristic for when a refusal to supply leads to consumer harm that covers everything from a capacity constrained, rivalrous port, to a non-capacity constrained, non-rivalrous interface specification. The focus should not be on the heuristic, […]