Some questions to ask about datasets and the importance of that data for markets, firms and allegations of market power: Is the data already replicated elsewhere? Is the data replicable? Is it rivalrous? If it is does the value of the dataset continue to increase with the size of the dataset? And if so, up to what point? This starts off a little theoretical but becomes more concrete towards the end. That said, any numbers below are hypothetical, to illustrate the argument, not to point fingers at any company or market. Is the data already replicated elsewhere? LinkedIn may know my date of birth and where I went to University. Other companies do as well. Can the data that LinkedIn […]
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, […]
There is a popular perception that competition law – and competition economics – has failed to keep up with technology markets. I don’t want to comment on whether I think that’s true but I do want to set out briefly what some of the problems might be. We’ve come a long way from a farmer tending his orchard and selling apples at the local market. In some ways that’s a shame because we have a pretty good idea of how to analyse any competition problems there. Though even there we can still argue about market definition, about degrees of concentration and about a myriad of other aspects of the competition rules. And this market is quite a simple one. Tech […]