Essential Platforms - Nikolas Guggenberger

Essential facilities doctrine - monopolists cannot gatekeep competitors from crucial markets via their infrastructures. “the essential facilities doctrine has fallen prey to excessive judicial trust in self-correcting markets and the ensuing curtailment of antitrust enforcement”

“At its first level, regulators and courts must bar platforms from discriminating and self-preferencing. At its second level, after an appropriate amortization period, antitrust enforcers must upend platform-monopolies entirely, by forcing interoperability between platforms”

“On the one hand, platforms create and curate markets, like Amazon Marketplace. They provide infrastructure and act as umpires, developing and enforcing governing norms by which platform users must abide. On the other hand, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebookalso use their platforms to provide their own services to end-users—in direct competition with third-party vendors. As an example, Amazon sells products in its own name on Amazon Marketplaceand competes with third-party sellers on the platform”

“As with toll bridges, re-establishing competition as a process to define the access conditions is not always possible. And even where it is theoretically possible, it might not constitute the optimal policy response, nor suffice to create the kind of digital ecosystem we desire.”

“The doctrine is a necessary complement to other approaches, such as horizontal break-ups, tighter merger reviews, regulatory interoperability requirements, non-discrimination rules, public utility frameworks or digital public infrastructure, data sharing mandates, the functional separation of platforms and commerce, and reforms to the tax code”

“creating and protecting monopolies, in the form of exclusive rights or otherwise, can incentivize innovation. However, any monopoly must be limited in scope and duration to ensure competition and progress”

“new customers do not join because of the quality of the product but because of the size of the network. At that point, network effects no longer reward innovation, but only form barriers to entry that foreclose mark”