Competition Law, Regulation and Digital Platforms

This book confronts and analyses how competition law in its present form is unable to deal with the new advances in digital technology that have made tech giants not subject to national jurisdictions as they straddle the world, with a particular focus on Japan, China, UK, EU and USA.

Demonstrating how the gatekeeping role of digital platforms has broken through the boundaries of national regulation, this book highlights examples where companies have broken and infringed antitrust law with impunity, pursuing self-preferencing and unfair competition practices solely for their own profitability. It also identifies how tech giants can open their digital platforms for fair use by consumers, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and creators ,while still allowing tech giants to maintain their important role as gatekeepers of digital security that protects users from cyberattacks. This is followed by an examination of the similarities between tech giants and big pharma within the competition law and intellectual property context, revealing how tech giants are beginning to target the healthcare sector.

Exploring how intellectual property rights are interwoven through new modernising regulations to curtail the dominance of Big Tech on digital platforms, this book will appeal to students, scholars and practitioners of Business Ethics, Intellectual Property, Law, and Regulation.

Ruth Taplin (PhD London School of Economics and Political Science [LSE] and Graduate Diploma in Law) is Director of the Centre for Japanese and East Asian Studies, London, Editor/Founder of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Economics and Business Law (IJEBL), Professor Taplin is the author/editor of 28 books and over 200 articles. Early on in her career she was chosen as a future leader in the Japanese field for the UK.

Kazuhiko Fuchikawa is an Associate Professor of Competition Law at Keio University, Japan. Professor Fuchikawa is a winner of the Masatoshi Yokota Memorial Award (New Face Award of the Japan Association of Economic Law), 2015.