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BCCP Online Panel 2021

Date
June 18, 2021
Time 15:00–18:00
Location
Online

BCCP Online Panel 2021

Topic:Regulatory Challenges in Digital Markets: the Digital Markets Act

The tremendous growth of digital transactions – mainly through online platforms - is profoundly affecting the way we interact and opening vast opportunities to improve our lives. Consumers are benefiting from an unprecedented proliferation of new services and products that previously were too costly to be developed and marketed to customers. At the same time, the characteristics of platform business models, such as multi-sidedness, network effects, or their dependence on big (personal) data, raise market power issues. Besides the policy debate about the necessity to update current merger control and antitrust tools to account for these features of the digital economy, policymakers are starting to discuss and implement ex ante regulation of dominant digital platforms to complement antitrust intervention and restore competition in digital markets.

This year’s online conference is focusing on the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU legislative proposal to regulate digital markets in order to prevent abuses of market power. This regulatory tool contains behavioral obligations for large online platforms (‘gatekeepers’) aimed at reducing entry barriers and ensuring fairness in the relationship between digital platforms and their different user groups. While focusing on the prohibitions and obligations laid out in the DMA, this conference will also discuss similar initiatives by other jurisdictions, including France, Germany, the UK, and the US. It brings together leading experts to discuss the road ahead for improving institutions, curbing dominant platforms’ market power, restoring competitive digital markets, as well as fostering entry and innovation for the good of society.

Conference Recording   Conference Review

Twitter Feed: #bccpconf

Speakers

Cristina Caffarra (Senior Consultant, Charles River Associates)

Isabelle de Silva (President, French Autorité de la concurrence) 

Amelia Fletcher (Professor of Competition Policy, University of East Anglia and Centre for Competition Policy)

Fiona Scott Morton (Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics, Yale University School of Management)

Monika Schnitzer (Professor of Economics, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich)

Moderated by Özlem Bedre-Defolie (ESMT Berlin)