Heads of Major Countries' Competition Authorities Call for New Standards to Assess Big Tech's Anti-Competitive Practices

Heads of major competition authorities reaffirmed the need for new approaches to address anti-competitive conduct by big tech platform companies in the digital economy. In particular, they agreed on the necessity of introducing new standards to clearly assess the anti-competitive effects arising from mergers involving platform companies.

On the 27th, the "2nd International Meeting of Competition Authority Heads," jointly hosted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division (DOJ), was held. The meeting was attended by heads of competition authorities from Korea, the U.S., and the EU, where discussions were held on the challenges faced by competition authorities under the platform economy. The competition authority heads agreed on the need to actively respond to emerging competition issues and committed to making their best efforts to revise merger review standards.

Google's "Open First - Restrict Later" Strategy... Mention of Representative Anti-Competitive Conduct

At the meeting, the heads of competition authorities shared their countries' law enforcement experiences regarding new anti-competitive strategies by platform companies in the digital economy, citing Google's anti-competitive conduct as an example. Chairman Han stated, “Google achieved a high market share by initially providing the OS source code as open source free of charge, and later restored competitive pressure by sanctioning its conduct of controlling manufacturers' innovative OS development through anti-fragmentation agreements (AFA).”

Olivier Gerstenmeyer, Director-General for Competition at the EU, also emphasized that Google restricted competition by utilizing anti-fragmentation agreements through its "open first - restrict later" strategy. Accordingly, regarding enforcement standards, for digital market cases, they are considering excluding certain legal violation criteria such as the "Efficient Competitor Test" (a tool to assess the anti-competitive nature of exclusionary pricing conduct by a dominant firm, where illegality is recognized only if the conduct harms a competitor as efficient as the dominant firm) and the "Essentiality Test" (a criterion that requires the input to be essential when determining whether a dominant firm imposed unfair conditions as a prerequisite for access to a specific input).

Need for Change in Platform Influence Assessment Criteria... 'Revenue' Alone Is Insufficient

There was also consensus on the need to change merger review standards. Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive of the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, pointed out that the criterion of "revenue" is insufficient to assess the market influence of digital companies providing free services and proposed the "Supply Share Test" as a complementary criterion. The Supply Share Test considers cases where the combined company's share of supply of goods or services in the relevant UK market increases, and if the share exceeds 25%, the merger is regarded as having an impact on the UK.

Jonathan Kanter, Assistant Attorney General of the U.S. DOJ, expressed great interest in the Korea Fair Trade Commission's law enforcement in the digital market and mentioned that the DOJ is also actively working to improve the merger review system. Chairman Han introduced the KFTC's efforts to revise merger review standards to explicitly consider the two-sided nature of platforms during platform merger reviews and to allow consideration of various proxy variables beyond revenue when evaluating market concentration.

Photo of heads of competition authorities attending an international conference. From left to right: Lao, Deputy Director of Competition Bureau at FTC; Paula Blizzard, Deputy Attorney General of California; Han Gijeong, Chairman; Hetal Doshi, Deputy Assistant Attorney General of DOJ Antitrust Division; Olivier Gersem, Director General of EU Competition Directorate.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.