Abstract
This Article considers the relationship between competition policy and the technologies of information. Technological change can both facilitate and undermine the use of information for anticompetitive practices. The effects are heavily, although not exclusively, a result of digitization and the many products and processes that it enables. Further, information technologies account for a significant portion of the difficulties that antitrust law encounters when it addresses intellectual property (IP) rights. In addition, changes in the technologies of information affect the structures of certain products, in the process either increasing or decreasing the potential for competitive harm. Of particular importance here are the measurement of market power in heavily digital technologies; the changing role of consumer choice in digital markets, focusing here on the Google Search investigation; the impact of digitization on the opportunities for collusion, focusing on the Apple eBooks antitrust case; the role of the antitrust laws in facilitating net neutrality or other conceptions of internet competition; and the role of information in antitrust evaluation of patent practices, particularly those pertaining to FRAND licensing in markets subject to standard setting, and patent pools.
Recommended Citation
Herbert Hovenkamp,
Antitrust and Information Technologies,
68 Fla. L. Rev.
419
(2016).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol68/iss2/9