Open Internet Project Manifesto - Paris Declaration of May 15, 2014

Here.

Economic Rationales of Exclusive Dealing; Empirical Evidence from the French Distribution Networks

M. Fadairo, J. Yu, here. 

Old friends in new frocks? MFN clauses in the online hotel booking sector/14

(Previous installments here)

In conclusion, and based on the above reflections, some tentative answers to the central question of this serial: What is really new about retail MFN clauses?

For years already, competition/antitrust circles have discussed whether anticompetitive motives and efficiency justifications underlying the adoption of vertical restraints in the off-line world equally applied to on-line sales. Thus, for instance, most participants in an OECD roundtable on vertical restraints for on-line sales agreed that “a new economic and regulatory framework was not needed to assess the competitive implications of vertical restraints” in the Internet economy. After all, as recently argued by Alexander Italiener, the EC Director-General for Competition, some of the actual issues emerging from e-commerce, such as how to deal with on-line resellers accused of free-riding on others’ promotional efforts, are hardly a novelty. Differences in scale and speed notwithstanding, mail order companies in the pre-Internet time were accused of doing broadly the same.

With regard specifically to retail MFN clauses as used by multi-sided platforms, before asking questions about the suitability of our current economic and regulatory framework in order assess them, it should be noted that this type of vertical restraint might raise some "original" competition concerns.

(To be continued)

The ten things that define you

J. Zittrain, here.