Making Markets Work for People
Fiona Scott Morton’s Digital Platform Regulation: Making Markets Work for People tackles a vital question for consumers across the world today: How can better rules promoting competition and access help people, businesses, and communities benefit from digital platforms?
The lack of competition in digital markets around the world has led to numerous problems for consumers and society worldwide, from high prices to limited choices to restricted innovation. In recent years, regulators and antitrust enforcers have increasingly turned their attention to these issues. In Europe, the passage of the Digital Markets Act established a regulatory regime to address both competition and fairness concerns. In the United States, the federal and state governments are pursuing a slate of suits to redress the same issues.
These jurisdictions—and many others around the world—are at different points on the same journey and have had varying amounts of success in identifying and prosecuting anticompetitive activities and situations. But there are difficult and important questions remaining: how best can we remedy harmful conduct and what rules should major digital platforms should have to follow in order to restore and protect competition among, and access to, those platforms for both businesses and consumers.
The absence of digital monopolization cases in the decades between the Microsoft and Google search cases has resulted in a dearth of literature on effective remedies in such markets. The novelty of digital technologies has likewise meant that there is no sectoral regulator in the US, contributing again to the lack of experience and absence of research into what rules promotes competition and innovation. This book sets out to fill the gap. Fiona Scott Morton’s decades of experience in competition economics and industrial organization—in academia, public service, and the private sector—inform the writing herein, alongside many collaborators from legal, technological, and economic fields across two continents. Government officials, young professionals, and entrepreneurs alike will find the book provides a set of intellectually sound, enforceable, and impactful tools to solve these complex issues. Light-touch pro-competitive regulation harnesses the power of economic analysis to achieve maximal benefit to consumers and society with minimal government intervention.
