Can Common Business Practices Ever Be Anticompetitive? Redefining Monopolization

For most of its modern history, antitrust law distinguished between normal competition and monopolization by looking for merit, legitimate business justifications, or efficiencies in the challenged business conduct. These proxies were seen as appropriate because they served antitrust law's welfare objectives well. However, the universal adoption of these proxies has overshadowed significant shortcomings, chief among them being that firms do not think in terms of legitimate business justifications or efficiencies, but rather in terms of long‐term sustainability and appropriation of value. As a result, antitrust law becomes detached from the very subjects it purports to regulate. Against the backdrop of the recent resurgence of enforcement activity, particularly involving tech giants, this article attempts a conceptualization of monopolization that does not revolve around merit in any form or function. Instead it introduces the proxy of commonness of business practices to determine their legality. This helps highlight the importance of considering “how things are done” in the relevant market, and helps reground antitrust law in business realities, which can enhance the heuristic mechanism of distinguishing between normal and anticompetitive practices. To prove this point the article develops an error test framework, through which it compares current tests with the proposed test in terms of their error footprint and concludes that the integration of the commonness parameter delivers better results. Ultimately, the inquiry undertaken herein is not only about constructing a conception of normal competition different from the only standard we currently have, that is, variants of merit, but also about shifting the conversation from how to fine‐tune existing standards to how to capture a more complete conception of competition

Exclusion in Digital Markets

This Article proceeds as follows: a short introduction to exclusion is offered in Part 2 for the purposes of laying down basic assumptions, an analytical framework, and the overall ideological tone of the article. Then Parts 3 to 6 discuss the relevant parameters in assessing when digital exclusion can be anticompetitive. In particular, Parts 3 and 4 look into the competitive conditions in the market and discuss mechanisms by which the supply and demand sides of markets react to exclusionary practices to limit them. Part 5 concerns itself with another condition of anticompetitive exclusion, namely the requirement that the power to exclude and the related exclusionary practice persist in time to a degree that regulatory or antitrust intervention becomes necessary. Part 6 illuminates the exclusion’s role as a business strategy in digital markets. The idea is that under the special conditions of digital markets, some exclusionary practices may constitute normal competition and not monopolization techniques, which would remove them from the range of offenses regulators or antitrust authorities would wish to pursue. Taken together these factors update and enrich the general analytical framework used to assess exclusion

Systemic Efficiencies in Competition Law: Evidence from the ICT Industry

This article introduces the concept of systemic efficiencies, traces its theoretical underpinnings in economics, management and technology, and applies it to recent high profile cases. Systemic efficiencies occur in large complex systems through the interaction of multiple distributed components, a process which is commonly coordinated by an entity that can exercise pervasive control over the components and their interactions. This type of extensive control can manifest itself as potentially anticompetitive practices, like tying, refusal to deal and full line forcing, causing the reaction of competition authorities. However, at the same time, systemic efficiencies can have significant benefits that cannot be generated by smaller scale, simpler, more isolated efficiencies, and are therefore of great interest to society, and of high redeeming value as antitrust defence to the introducing entities. To demonstrate how systemic efficiencies and their benefits materialize in practice this article also discusses two series of cases: the recent IBM mainframes cases in the US and the US, and the ongoing Google Android cases in the US and the EU. Both cases belong in the ICT industry, which is frequently said to consist of paradigmatic examples of large complex systems that can give rise to systemic efficiencies

Apple v Pepper: the unintended fallout in Europe

No abstract available

Tensin1 expression and function in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

open access articleChronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) constitutes a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Genome wide association studies have shown significant associations between airflow obstruction or COPD with a non-synonymous SNP in the TNS1 gene, which encodes tensin1. However, the expression, cellular distribution and function of tensin1 in human airway tissue and cells are unknown. We therefore examined these characteristics in tissue and cells from controls and people with COPD or asthma. Airway tissue was immunostained for tensin1. Tensin1 expression in cultured human airway smooth muscle cells (HASMCs) was evaluated using qRT-PCR, western blotting and immunofluorescent staining. siRNAs were used to downregulate tensin1 expression. Tensin1 expression was increased in the airway smooth muscle and lamina propria in COPD tissue, but not asthma, when compared to controls. Tensin1 was expressed in HASMCs and upregulated by TGFβ1. TGFβ1 and fibronectin increased the localisation of tensin1 to fibrillar adhesions. Tensin1 and α-smooth muscle actin (αSMA) were strongly co-localised, and tensin1 depletion in HASMCs attenuated both αSMA expression and contraction of collagen gels. In summary, tensin1 expression is increased in COPD airways, and may promote airway obstruction by enhancing the expression of contractile proteins and their localisation to stress fibres in HASMCs

Cryptocurrency Competition and Market Concentration in the Presence of Network Effects

When network products and services become more valuable as their userbase grows (network effects), this tendency can become a major determinant of how they compete with each other in the market and how the market is structured. Network effects are traditionally linked to high market concentration, early-mover advantages, and entry barriers, and in the market they have also been used as a valuation tool. The recent resurgence of Bitcoin has been partly attributed to network effects, too. We study the existence of network effects in six cryptocurrencies from their inception to obtain a high-level overview of the application of network effects in the cryptocurrency market. We show that, contrary to the usual implications of network effects, they do not serve to concentrate the cryptocurrency market, nor do they accord any one cryptocurrency a definitive competitive advantage, nor are they consistent enough to be reliable valuation tools. Therefore, while network effects do occur in cryptocurrency networks, they are not (yet) a defining feature of the cryptocurrency market as a whole