EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

Prague, Czechia

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

‘Sharing Economy’ and, hence, no detailed definitions and/or descriptions are needed at this point. I, therefore, only summarize some principal points utilising the documents referred to above. The ‘Sharing Economy’ is often understood to be a term “used to cover a wide range of internet-based business models” whose “underlying feature … is a multisided platform that facilitates exchange” (King 2015, p. 729). EC (2016a), for instance, defines collaborative/sharing as: [B]usiness models where activities are facilitated by collaborative platforms that create an open marketplace for the temporary usage of goods or services often provided by private individuals. The collaborative economy involves three categories of actors: (i) service providers who share assets, resources, time and/or skills – these can be private individuals offering services on an occasional basis (‘peers’) or service providers acting in their professional capacity (“professional services providers”); (ii) users of these; and (iii) intermediaries that connect – via an online platform v providers with users and that facilitate transactions between them (‘collaborative platforms’). Collaborative economy transactions generally do not involve a change of ownership and can be carried out for profit or not-for-profit. (EC 2016a, p. 3). These on-line enabled platforms are two-sided or multisided businesses, well described e.g., in Evans, Schmalensee (2016) or Kindl et al. (2021), ch. VII, but in comparison to traditional two-sided businesses (such as, e.g., newspapers) with the advent of Internet and smartphones usage they “have been ‘turbocharged’, reaching new levels of scale and effectiveness” (Nowag 2018, p. 384). That was caused primarily due to network effects and changes to operating models enabled by innovative digital technologies (Iansanti, Lakhani 2020, ch. 2). However, the ‘Sharing Economy’ is just a sub-group of a larger term “platform economy” which encompasses, for instance, also “online marketplaces, app stores, price comparison websites, search engines, social networks” (Bostoen, 2019, p. 1), and the like. The advent of ‘Sharing Economy’ also brought about a plethora of competition issues which have been discussed in academia from many angles (e.g., King 2015, Dunne 2018, Anderson, Huffman 2017, Lougher, Kalmanowicz 2016, Nowag 2018, Bostoen, 2019). Those issues include, inter alia , potential competition law risks associated with incumbent platforms abusing their positions to exclude rivals especially if they would not be allowing multi-homing (King 2015, pp. 730–732, Lougher, Kalmanowicz 2016, pp. 98–99), or with contracts that reference rivals (King 2015, pp. 732–734), risks of unilateral (both exclusionary and exploitative) as well as coordinated (both horizontal and vertical) anticompetitive conduct (Dunne 2018, pp. 92–103, Bostoen 2019).

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