From market power to the power to exclude
As markets and societies become increasingly reliant on digital solutions, businesses and individual users (in their roles as consumers and citizens) grow ever more dependent on digital platforms for access to a wide range of opportunities. This creates a concentration of control which gives platform operators significant power to regulate access. One might even say that this kind of power resembles the regulatory power historically associated with statutory monopolies, but without comparable accountability safeguards. This has led to concerns about arbitrary exclusion, and ultimately to questions about how the law can or should respond. My PhD dissertation ‘Safeguarding essential access: A study of the essential facilities doctrine and the public service concept and their application in digital markets’, written within the ERC-funded ‘Modern Bigness’ project, investigates these very concerns and questions.
In this post, I summarise the main findings, but also push them in a direction that the dissertation only touches upon: enforcement. The argument ultimately made in that respect is that a right of access is only as strong as the mechanism that gives it effect.
Continue reading “Who enforces access to essential digital platforms?”