Does European competition law need to take a new approach to zero-price markets in the digital economy? – a study of the application of Article 102 to zero-price markets.

More and more often in the digitalised world, consumers come into contact with undertakings operating within the zero-price market. That is, where the product or service is offered to the consumer at a price of zero. Examples of zero-priced markets are numerous, from shopping malls, to social media and credit cards. This market type is not an insignificant one, with Facebook and Google, two of the largest internet companies offering zero price goods, having a market capitalisation of $1,645 billion as of June 2020. The topic of data driven digital zero-price markets has been receiving increasing amounts of attention in recent years. The OECD, Commission, national competition law authorities and academics have increasingly been considering this market type. It is often said that the consumer pays to use these digital services with their person data. In online transactions, essentially all transactions require at least some disclosure of the user’s personal data. This personal data is highly valuable to undertakings, with companies willing to receive consumers data instead of being paid by them with money. Overall, the question which I pose is whether EU competition law can deal with the unique characteristics of these digital zero-price markets. The economic and consumer welfare grounding of Article 102 means that it is adaptable to zero-price markets, and the special characteristics of zero-price markets are to an extent already considered in a competition law analysis. This market type is unique and significantly different to the traditional market types that EU competition law has been faced with in the past. For one, these markets operate largely on the digital sphere, meaning that they are characterised by competition for the market, exceedingly fast innovation and unique barriers to entry. These markets are multisided, with consumers, advertisers, merchants and the undertaking all operating on unique parameters but interacting with one-another. Finally, the goods/services are provided at zero-price, which traditional economic analysis struggles to adapt to, whilst consumers are faced with alternative costs through their attention and information (data) and reduction of quality. The Google Search (Shopping) case shows these characteristics in action, and demonstrates the challenges which EU competition law faces when applied to this market type. It also shows the current capabilities of the law in dealing with this market type. There are ways that the law can be adapted, utilising new tests which focus on other cost parameters than price, putting more weighting on factors other than monetary price and looking at different competitive parameters such as quality. This thesis does not seek to criticise EU competition law as a whole. It is limited to considering specifically digital zero-priced markets. It is concluded that more can be done to ensure that its unique characteristics can be included in a competition law analysis. In this respect, the EU can become a leader, laying the groundwork for the future competition law treatment of these undertakings, and ensuring that it is properly recognised that consumers can face competitive harms even if it is not based upon a monetary price

"The Relative Efficiency and Cost of Plumbers' Work."

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Emergence or self-organization? Look to the soil population

Emergence is not well defined, but all emergent systems have the following characteristics. The whole is more than the sum of the parts, they show bottom-up rather top-down organization and, if biological, they involve chemical signalling. Self-organization can be understood in terms of the second and third stages of thermodynamics enabling these stages used as analogues of ecosystem functioning. The second stage system was suggested earlier to provide a useful analogue of the behaviour of natural and agricultural ecosystems subjected to perturbations, but for this it needs the capacity for self-organization. Considering the hierarchy of the ecosystem suggests that this self-organization is provided by the third stage, whose entropy maximization acts as an analogue of that of the soil population when it releases small molecules from much larger molecules in dead plant matter. This it does as vigorously as conditions allow. Through this activity, the soil population confers self-organization at both the ecosystem and the global level. The soil population has been seen as both emergent and self-organizing, supporting the suggestion that the two concepts are are so closely linked as to be virtually interchangeable. If this idea is correct one of the characteristics of a biological emergent system seems to be the ability to confer self-organization on an ecosystem or other entity which may be larger than itself. The beehive and the termite colony are emergent systems which share this ability

Helping farmers to help themselves

Rothamsted 150th anniversar

Evaluation of the ECOSSE model to predict heterotrophic soil respiration by direct measurements

Acknowledgements This work contributes to the ELUM (Ecosystem Land Use Modelling & Soil Carbon GHG Flux Trial) project, which was commissioned and funded by the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), and to Carbo-BioCrop (http://www.carbobiocrop.ac.uk; a NERC funded project; NE/H010742/1), UKERC Phase II and III (NERC; NE/H013237/1), MAGLUE (http://www.maglue.ac.uk; an EPSRC funded project; EP/M013200/1) and as part of the Seventh Framework For Research Programme of the EU, within the EUROCHAR project (N 265179) and EXPEER within WU FP7-Infrastructures. We acknowledge the use of the E-OBS dataset from the EU-FP6 project ENSEMBLES (http://ensembles-eu.metoffice.com) and the data providers in the ECA&D project (http://www.ecad.eu). We thank two anonymous reviewers and Dr William van Dijk for their valuable suggestions.Peer reviewedPostprin