Andrey Tsarikovskiy: we are at the very beginning of regulating the digital technologies market

Representatives of competition authorities, experts and lawyers discussed new challenges for antimonopoly bodies, how digital technologies are changing the global economy and special sector laws

Stats-Secretary, Deputy Head of FAS Andrey Tsarikovskiy moderated a session on antimonopoly regulation of the market of digital technologies on 19 May 2017 at St Petersburg International Legal Forum.

“We begin living in a completely new world”, emphasized Deputy Head of FAS, who pointed out that new approaches are necessary since digital market has its own specific rules: “For example, it is not possible to evaluate the market and determine its boundaries using classical economic methods”.

Andrey Tsarikovskiy explained that spreading of digital technologies will lead to changing legal regulation. He added, however, that “right now we are at the very beginning”.

Experts who took part in the session agreed unanimously that new algorithms for the digital sector should be developed. For instance, Oliveira Junior Marcio, a lecturer at London University College and former Head of Brazil competition authority, outlined his practice of digital market cases and emphasized that ‘to make adequate decisions it is necessary to analyze the consequences for new markets and conduct economic evaluation”.

Head of FAS Department for Regulating Communications and Information Technologies, Elena Zaeva, discussed practice of Russian antimonopoly body in market analysis in the course of investigating cases against large IT-companies. She emphasized multilateralization of the information market using an example of the Microsoft case: “For instance, according to a consumer survey, fixed and mobile devices are two different markets”.

Talking about orientation of information technologies towards consumer consciousness, Head of the Law and Development Institute, High School of Economics – Skolkovo Alexei Ivanov, made an analogy with the advertising market. He expressed confidence that “the experience of advertising control accumulated by FAS will facilitate development of efficient tools for working with electronic technologies”.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Kerber of Philipps-Universität Marburg pointed out that the European Union also is discussing the digital sphere. He added: Politics and experts should combine their efforts in the field of protection of intellectual law and information”.

Head of FAS Anti-Cartel Department Andrey Tenishev talked about coming of the “digital era” for anticompetitive agreements. He pointed out that FAS is investigating work of robots on electronic auctions. The programme makes price offers and wins government contracts. “We have found 25 such auctions”, stated Andrey Tenishev.

He emphasized: “Software also is used in retail: enabling to read and compare competitors’ prices. The programme is also used to coordinate prices for cartels.  This is the reason for opening an antimonopoly case against “LG”.

Ending up the session, Andrey Tsarikovskiy added that FAS actively engages state-of-the-art-technologies in its work. He concluded: "FAS investigates cartels on the basis of the big data technology”.