EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

Prague, Czechia

However, this does not imply that traditional providers and P2P service providers must follow the same set of standards in order to avoid market distortions (Jones and Sufrin and Dunne, 2019). The goal of regulation should not be to protect individuals against potentially more efficient competitors, but rather to correct market failure in each situation. Regulation may be less stringent than with traditional providers due to the use of new technology, particularly in the case of peer-to-peer services. It should also be ensured that the amount of control considered the supplier’s specific scope. Unreasonable regulation should not be used to put excessive restrictions on intermittent P2P network activity. Finally, it’s worth noting that many of the technologies employed by sharing economy firms can also be used by traditional providers. To minimize market distortions, these providers’ regulatory framework should be assessed to see if it is still current, or if it needs to be adjusted or reduced. Regulations that are no longer essential or that have become obsolete due to new technology should be modified (Budzinski and Mendelsohn, 2021). Extending similar limits to include P2P services, on the other hand, is not recommended because it would reduce the efficiency gains noted above, placing consumers and businesses at a disadvantage. 3.4 Concentration tendencies and potential competition problems From an economic point of view, P2P services are so-called two-sided or multi sided platforms (Niels and Ralston. 2021). The platform service itself acts as an intermediary between the providers and buyers of certain products or services. There is a propensity for market concentration, as with other two-sided or multi-sided platforms. As a result, favourable indirect network effects between individual platform user groups are mostly responsible for fostering concentration. This indicates that a greater number of users on one platform, such as potential visitors, benefit from a greater number of users on the other, and vice versa. Indirect network effects and economies of scale favor increased market concentration. This does not, however, imply that the market must be monopolized. As there are additional variables that resist concentration, there must be comparable competitive issues. On the one hand, there are platform capacity and usage constraints, as well as differentiation choices, and on the other, there is so-called multihoming, which allows specific user groups to access several platform services at the same time. However, if a P2P service has a strong market position, it can, like other corporations, try to utilize its market power to stifle other platforms or drive them out of the market (Budzinski and Gaenssle and Stöhr, 2020, pp. 38–43). It’s possible, for example, that a platform provider exploits exclusive agreements to prohibit its customers from using other platform services, preventing competing platforms from developing and perhaps driving them out of business. It’s debatable if such exclusivity contracts can be enforced. Overall, a possible concentration tendency in peer-to-peer services should not be utilized to make broad conclusions about

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