Competition Policy for the Digital Era
Summary
Commissioner Vestager has asked us to explore how competition policy should evolve to continue to promote pro-consumer innovation in the digital age. We structured our report as follows. First, we describe the digital world and what we see as the main ways in which markets function in the digital era (Chapter 2). We then outline our views of the goals of EU competition law in the digital era and
the methodologies it should use (Chapter 3). Second, with this framework as background, we discuss the application of competition rules to platforms (Chapter 4) and data (Chapter 5), and we inquire whether European merger control needs an update (Chapter 6). We finally provide our conclusions. An important caveat at the outset: we make general suggestions, but of course digital services can be very diverse and the ways they compete require, as always under competition law, a case-by-case analysis.