Antitrust and Upstream Platform Power Plays: A Policy in Bed with Procrustes [Hardcover]

Combining legal reasoning with insights from an array of disciplines, Antitrust and Upstream Platform Power Plays addresses how antitrust policy should regulate powerful digital platforms that exploit dependent suppliers upstream in the value chain, providing a normative, theoretical, and practical analysis.In recent years, large digital platforms have been in the doghouse of antitrust decision-makers worldwide. Antitrust regulators agree, urgent intervention is needed. Interestingly, it is the plight of victimized suppliersof merchants, app developers, publishers, platform labourers, and the like, who are upstream in the value chainthat has topped the policy agenda, prompting scrutiny of an almost unprecedented intensity. Amid such anxieties,Antitrust and Upstream Platform Power Playsasks a somewhat provocative question: are upstream platform power plays really 'competition problems', and ones for antitrust, at that?The obvious answer'yes'is deceptively simple for a number of reasons. First, it contradicts contemporary antitrust's single-minded focus on consumers, which has all but erased supplier exploitation in the brick-and-mortar economy from the policy's radar. Second, the wider antitrust community remains bitterly divided when it comes to judging platform practices. In addition, if any consensus could be had, it would almost certainly confirm the long-standing tenet that antitrust cannot be about supplier welfare, as such. These paradoxes call for a policy introspectionprecisely what this book provides.The analysis offered inAntitrust and Upstream Platform Power Playsis altogether normative, theoretical, and practical. Normative because it engages in a supplier-mindful soul-searching exercise, which advances our understanding of antitrust's foundations; theoretical as it sheds multidisciplinary insights on upstream effects in the platform economy and develops new frameworks for rationalizing them; and practical since it takes a deep dlsC