Joanna Tsai and Michael Salinger contributed chapters for the recently released Report on the Digital Economy published by The Global Antitrust Institute (GAI). The Report explores the ongoing debate about the role of antitrust in the digital age and features contributions from some of the most influential economists, legal scholars, and practitioners across the global antitrust community.
Dr. Tsai’s chapter “Standards Development Organizations, Intellectual Property, and Standardization: Fundamentals and Recent Proposals” contains a primer on Standards development organizations (SDOs) and reviews the current policy debate on SDOs and intellectual property rights. She also summarizes some of the recent proposals that relate to standards and interoperability and offers her views on those proposals. Click here to read the chapter.
In his chapter “Self-Preferencing” Professor Salinger explores whether there should still be a presumption that the economic relationship between the production of vertically-related and complementary products is fundamentally different from the economic relationship between the production of substitute products. If so, intervention with respect to vertical/complementary mergers, agreements, and expansion should be far more limited than intervention with respect to horizontal mergers, agreements, and (to a lesser extent) expansion. Click here to read the chapter.
The Report features 34 chapters broken down over three sections: Section I explains the foundational economic concepts and legal principles that apply to the digital economy; Section II gives an overview of the state of competition in digital markets, current antitrust enforcement efforts, competition, concentration, and the role of government in the competitive process; and Section III analyzes contemporary proposals to overhaul the antitrust laws and offers evidence-based proposals for how to improve antitrust institutions to promote competition in the digital economy.
