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, […]
This is a lightly edited version of a speech I gave at the Chillin’ Competition conference late last year where I gave the opening speech for the panel, “An Emerging Competition Law for a New Economy?” I begin with the usual disclaimer that I’m speaking in a personal capacity and my views are not necessarily those of the European Commission. In the early years of the “new economy”, lawyers had a strange tendency to use horse metaphors to describe what they thought was going on in the law. Judge Frank Easterbrook – an excellent jurist and one never short of a strong opinion – speaking at an internet law conference with Lawrence Lessig lambasted the very idea of the conference. […]