Analysis Group Coauthors Explore Economic Drivers and Regulatory Changes for Digital-Platform Competition in Antitrust Magazine
April 30, 2025
The evolution of digital-platform technology – the web-based infrastructure underlying ride sharing, food-delivery apps, and some online marketplaces – has transformed how products and services are bought and sold. The economics of these digital platforms differs from that of some other businesses along several dimensions. In an article published in Antitrust Magazine, Analysis Group Managing Principal Rebecca Kirk Fair and Vice Presidents Rebecca Scott and Kristof Zetenyi identify key economic features of digital platforms and discuss how these factors may shape competition in the digital-platform marketplace.
Using recent significant merger and acquisition investigations as examples, the authors describe how competition authorities across Europe and the US have grappled with issues that commonly arise in digital-platform transactions, such nascent competitors and “big data.” The authors then explore recent developments in the regulation of digital-platform mergers. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have updated existing merger guidelines to reflect considerations specific to platforms. The EU and the UK, however, have taken a legislative approach, passing new laws that affect the regulation of digital-platform transactions. The authors observe that although competition authorities in these jurisdictions “are grappling with the new world of digital-platform competition, they are doing so from different angles, and they do not appear poised to converge on common rules and enforcement practices.”