The increasing dominance of a small number of big tech companies, across a range of critical online markets, has led to growing calls for regulation to promote more competition and to ensure that market power is not exploited unfairly. Policy makers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and the European Union are weighing dramatic changes to regulatory regimes to address these challenges. Fragmentation of regulatory approaches drives up compliance costs for firms and, as digital markets are highly interdependent, national regulations can have extraterritorial effects, creating the need for international cooperation. Should we be making more use of trade agreements to promote competition in digital markets and, if so, what form might this take?
This session will explore:
- What problem is pro-competition digital platform regulation trying to solve? Why use regulation and not competition law?
- To what extent is international coordination needed to achieve competitive digital markets? How much coordination is already happening? How effective is it?
- What role should trade agreements play? Should they be used as vehicles to deepen cooperation between regulatory authorities (for example, in investigation and enforcement), promote regulatory harmonization, or contain specific regulatory commitments (for example, an agreement to proscribe specific anti-competitive behaviours)?
The study group is co-organized by the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford; UK Trade Policy Observatory, Sussex University; Chatham House; the Centre for International Governance Innovation; and the Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub at The George Washington University.
