Regulation of Marketplaces. Recent Proposals. An Assessment

There is an important international discussion on the feasibility of regulating online businesses and the right antitrust tools to benefit consumers and competition. Some of the concerns are about the online businesses of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Hoverkamp (2020) has suggested that these businesses use different inputs (although there may be some overlap), that they sell different products, and that they deal with users in varying ways, so that their only common characteristic is that they are very large and that a large part of their technology is digital. Given this framing of online businesses, the position of this paper is that there is no single regulatory approach that can apply to all of these businesses. We focus our discussion on marketplaces. First, we survey the economic literature on marketplaces. We then analyze the arguments of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law (hereafter referred to as the Subcommittee) regarding competition in online businesses. We briefly discuss proposals for regulating online businesses in different parts of the world, and we survey the empirical economic literature on marketplaces. We conclude with an assessment of the problems these proposals will face, in light of the literature surveyed.