The Digital Economy and Asian Competition Law: An Introduction

Digital economy is a concept that has been around for nearly three decades. During this period, the concept has developed to include three dimensions. The core dimension of the digital economy surrounds information and communication technology. The narrow dimension of the digital economy embraces digital platforms and the businesses that are built on these platforms. The broad dimension of the digital economy deals with the digitization of the economy, of which artificial intelligence, sensors, cloud-based databases are the core. Several Asian countries, such as India, Indonesia, Japan, and Thailand, are moving towards the broad dimension of the digital economy. Despite this evolution, competition law literature is only recently embracing the concept of digital economy. The preference in the literature was to either refer to specific technological evolutions, use high technology, or bring up the concept of New Economy. It is only recently that digital economy is more and more used by the community of competition law scholars. Much of this literature deals with platforms, data and privacy, thus the narrow dimension of the digital economy. This book will follow this trend. However, the last part of this book will already relate to the broad dimension by discussing the use of artificial intelligence in price setting strategies.