Nehaa Chaudhari and Anirudh Rastogi of Ikigai Law were in conversation with Ajinkya M Tulpule, Senior Legal Counsel, Ferrero in Luxembourg to examine the competition law efforts at regulating the tech sector. This webinar covered European Union (EU) competition law and regulatory responses to platform and data regulation, and what this could mean for India.
The discussion can be found here.
Ajinkya walked us through the harm theories in EU and United States, while expanding on the competition concerns over the Facebook-Jio deal. He further discussed the policy interventions required from regulators and potential benefits that could come from entities mergers between companies with big data sets. The discussion touched upon a range of issues, including the Facebook-Jio deal, competing data sets, theories of harm in the EU and US, WhatsApp Pay, data portability, mobile interoperability, big data, third-party data on e-commerce platforms, privacy and access data to abuse of dominance.
Key issues discussed:
- Anti-trust concerns emerging from the Facebook-Jio deal (12:15)
- Jurisprudence on measuring of one data set to another and judging potential anti-trust harms (21:26)
- Different theories of harm that guide EU and US competition policy (25:29)
- Innovation or consumer welfare benefits benefits emerging from a ‘critical mass of data’ or big data mergers (29:25)
- Data sharing and access as a means to preserving the monopolies of leading platforms (31:28)
- Will APIs and data sharing reduce competition concerns? (33:07)
- Forced data sharing as a remedial action by competition regulators (39:40)
- Policy interventions required from regulators (45:48)
- What exactly does big data mean? (59:07)
- Using third party merchant data to aid their own products: e-commerce, big data and anti-trust (1:07:54)
- Relevant market and WhatsApp Pay. (1:12:31)
- Harmonizing a competitive data landscape with privacy (1:15:00)
- Potential implications for Indian competition law (1:20:19)
