Hello, Habr!
For 8 years I have been involved in projects in the antitrust area - one of the most interesting areas of jurisprudence. Now I lead a team at the law firm ART DE LEX, which specializes in digital markets. We are working on a case brought against Google by the Federal Antimonopoly Service today.
In this article, I will look at specific aspects of antitrust regulation in relation to digital platforms, provide examples of antitrust analysis and basic recommendations for users and platforms.
Recently, there has been an unprecedented attention of the state to the IT sphere and, first of all, to the activities of tech giants - Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook. The activity of the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, which were previously known for their soft attitude towards these companies and relied on the possibility of self-regulation of the industry, is of great importance here. For example, the FCS had grounds for filing a lawsuit against Google because of the actions to monopolize the mobile search market eight years ago, but the regulator's economists did not see significant risks then.
Now the situation has changed - at the end of last year, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Google, the FCS - against Facebook, and the US Congress is even considering the possibility of a forced separation of companies. Such activity in the homeland of tech giants (given the high level of protectionism) has become another signal to other countries to work in this direction. Moreover, there are already examples of rather aggressive behavior on the part of individual companies. For example, in Australia, in response to a new law obliging to share a part of advertising revenues generated through the use of news media content, Google threatened to close its search engine in the country, and Facebook temporarily blocked links to news from Australian publishers.
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So, we have previously identified the product - these are services of platforms with the above characteristics. Let's briefly call them the services of social network video hosting platforms (SSVs). The "social networking" add-on is here to emphasize user generated content and social elements.
The next step will be to define the interchangeable goods. More about this in the next article.