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EEC, jointly with Union States’ antitrust authorities, develops approaches to improve regulation in digital sphere
Besides the Heads of the Member States’ antitrust authorities, the meeting was attended by representatives of the Observer Countries at the EAEU - the Antimonopoly Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan and the Embassy of Cuba to Russia.
Delimitation of powers in the Commission’s digital markets and national antitrust regulators were discussed.
As the consultation attendees noted, the practice of antitrust regulation in digital markets is just being formed and currently there are no common approaches to determining the geographical and product boundaries of such markets as well as the interchangeability of goods and services.
In the course of the Commission’s law enforcement practice affecting advertising services in large Internet search engines, access to the service of taxi aggregators and application stores based on mobile device operating systems, some issues related to determining the transboundary nature of markets in question were revealed, among other things.
The Commission, jointly with the Union States’ antitrust authorities, develops approaches to improve regulation in the digital sphere scheduled to be submitted to the EEC Council for consideration in October this year.
The meeting attendees considered and discussed the draft review "Antitrust regulation of relations using exclusive intellectual property rights" prepared by the Commission’s Antitrust Unit. The same review related to special aspects of competition regulation in digital markets was recommended by the EEC Board in May of this year as a guide in solving issues of applying competition legislation in digital markets.
"Forming digital markets as well as the dominance of digital platforms known is associated with the use of intellectual property objects as a tool for obtaining competitive advantages. Therefore, getting the balance of interests of market participants, including copyright holders, their competitors and consumers, is one of the key issues in an attempt to settle this problem," the EEC Minister noted during the discussion of the draft review.
A significant part of the consultation was devoted to relevant matters of identifying violations of the general rules of competition in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The attendees shared the EAEU countries’ experience in implementing measures aimed at maintaining price stability in the consumer market in light of the pandemic.
The sides agreed to hold the next meeting in the "5+1" format on October 8 in Almaty (Republic of Kazakhstan), where it is planned to discuss issues of law enforcement practice and improvement of the EAEU law, the practice of evidencing cartels, including on commodity exchanges, as well as issues of compliance with competition in pharmaceutical markets.
