REPRESENTATIVES OF THE FAS RUSSIA TOOK PART IN THE MEETING OF THE OECD GLOBAL FORUM ON COMPETITION

Deputy Head of the FAS Russia Andrey Tsyganov made a report during a round table on the topic: "Abuse of dominance in digital markets"

Deputy Head of the Russian competition authority spoke about the application of antimonopoly legislation in cases of abuse of dominance in digital markets.

"Over the past five years, the FAS Russia has been actively considering cases of abuse of a dominance in digital markets against the largest Russian and foreign companies, including Google Inc., Apple Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Booking.com B.V., Gett Taxi, providing conditions for competition in both domestic and global IT markets. Significant changes in the structure of this sphere lead to the need to improve methods for defining the boundaries of commodity markets, establishing the dominant position of individual market participants, assessing the influence of adjacent markets on each other", – the speaker said.

Andrey Tsyganov noted that as part of the investigations carried out by the
FAS Russia, it became obvious that standard mechanisms of economic analysis are insufficient in cases where the regulator deals with digital platforms and markets with "zero price". Deputy Head of the FAS Russia said that the competition authority began to develop new approaches to assessing multilateral markets, market shares based on different indicators for calculating market share (number of applications, users, announcements, downloads, transactions through the platform, the volume of "big data", etc.) and assessing the level of direct and indirect network effects, as well as obtaining market power by the platform, including the degree of influence of key digital infrastructure to adjective markets.

Andrey Tsyganov cited as examples the approaches to the analysis of product and geographical boundaries of commodity markets of the FAS Russia investigation against Google and Microsoft, noting that in each specific case, the competition authority uses the most accurate indicators and research methods that allow making balanced and reasonable decisions.