IT for Change provided feedback for the EU Consultation for the New Competition Tool and the Digital Services Act Package.
This was followed up with a questionnaire that included our inputs.
The EU proposal for a New Competition Tool is one of the measures aimed at addressing gaps in the current EU competition rules and allowing for timely and effective intervention against structural competition problems across markets.The increasing digitalisation of society and economy has attracted attention under competition policy to resolve the issues arising from it. The submission by IT for Change highlighted that as a significantly new economic paradigm, the digital economy, cannot be successfully regulated by industrial age competition tools. We have also suggested that successful digital economy regulation should focus on the data, cloud, digital intelligence, and intelligent services layers of a digital economy. Though various behavioural remedies can be aimed at these layers, to further competition in each of them, the paper proposes a regulatory ideal-type for structural separations across these digital layers, as appropriate. Such separations may contextually be applied across some layers and not others, and may be complete or partial.
We also provided our research input for EU's discussion for the Digital Services Act Package which seeks to regulate the platform economy though measures such as influencing the contractual terms and bargaining position between the platforms and the business users it hosts. We submitted that transparency and measures of redress are not enough to deal with extraordinary platform power. In this regard it should also involve regulations like (1) mandating non-discrimination, (2) data sharing, and (3) structural separations along key functional layers of digital value chains.
