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European law --- Economic law --- European Union
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De platformeconomie is alomtegenwoordig: steeds meer transacties en interacties vinden plaats via online tussenpersonen zoals Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Google en Facebook.Hun opkomst in een juridisch niemandsland stelt beleidsmakers op Europees en Belgisch niveau voor talrijke vraagstukken. Dit boek biedt antwoorden via een praktische en rechtstakoverschrijdende benadering.
BPB9999 --- digitale economie --- elektronische handel --- juridische basis --- Platformeconomie ; recht --- Economie en technologie ; recht --- E-books --- Law of obligations. Law of contract --- Economic law --- Social law. Labour law --- Computer architecture. Operating systems --- Belgium --- Economic sociology --- Business management --- e-business --- economie --- arbeidsrecht --- economische ontwikkelingen --- e-commerce --- teleshopping --- economisch recht
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The overarching theme of this thesis is abusive pricing practices, but one abusive pricing practice – margin squeeze – takes center stage. This abuse occurs when a vertically integrated undertaking conducts an upstream or downstream pricing policy that does not allow an equally efficient competitor to trade profitably on the downstream market. Over time, the Commission and the European courts have developed a rationalised theory for this abuse. They assess margin squeeze as an independent abuse, using the as-efficient-competitor test and requiring anti-competitive effect. The as-efficient-competitor test evaluates whether the vertically integrated undertaking could offer its retail product to end-users profitably if it had been obliged to pay its own wholesale prices. In this way, it prevents the exclusion of competitors that are as efficient as the vertically integrated undertaking. Margin squeeze predominantly occurs in liberalised sectors, especially the telecom sector. While the Commission and European courts conceive margin squeeze as an independent abuse, this is far from the only possibility. The US Supreme Court, for example, does not endorse a separate margin squeeze theory, but requires either a duty-to-deal violation at the wholesale level or predatory pricing at the retail level. Two policy considerations seem to underlie this disagreement: price competition and legal certainty. Different authors see margin squeeze as price discrimination, predatory pricing, refusal to supply, excessive pricing, or a combination of those. As margin squeeze abuses mainly take place in regulated sectors, the interaction between competition law and sector-specific regulation raises questions. While these two regimes share a similar goal, they use different methods, which means their application may lead to different outcomes. In contrast to the US Supreme Court, the Commission and the European courts regard the two regimes as complimentary, with the state compulsion defence as a narrow exception. At the same time, competition law does take account of regulatory objectives. There are arguments pro and contra combining competition law and sector-specific regulation, but the combination may lead to an unsatisfying outcome, as the case of Deutsche Telekom demonstrates. When an undertaking abides by the national regulatory regime but is then found to abuse competition law, one may question who is at fault: the undertaking or the regulator/Member State.
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Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter: allemaal voorbeelden van cybergiganten die door het verzamelen van Big Data een nieuwe manier hebben gevonden om winst te creëren. Big Data houden gigantische hoeveelheden digitale gegevens in die door bedrijven, overheden en andere organisaties worden verzameld en gebruikt. Deze marktspelers kunnen aan de hand van deze gegevens achterhalen wat de consumenten aantrekt teneinde op die manier hun winst te maximaliseren. Voor bedrijven zoals Google en Facebook is dit een succesvol bedrijfsmodel dat ervoor heeft gezorgd dat deze ondernemingen - precies vanwege deze verworven macht - een dominante positie kunnen innemen op de markt. Het Europees mededingingsrecht viseert gedragingen van dominante marktspelers die concurrentie op de markt kunnen vervalsen. Onder artikel 102 VWEU wordt er onderzocht in hoeverre men een markt kan afbakenen binnen het domein van Big Data. Het onderzoek constateert dat er geen afzonderlijke Big Data markt bestaat, maar een opdeling in aparte kleinere markten meer wenselijk is. Het is immers zo dat hoe kleiner men de markt kan behouden, hoe sneller men kan besluiten tot machtsmisbruik. In de traditionele markten wijzen marktaandelen op de macht van een onderneming. In de nieuwe dynamische markten waarop Big Data betrekking heeft ontstaan er andere factoren die de marktmacht van een onderneming kunnen bepalen, zoals de netwerkeffecten, schaalvoordelen en toetredingsbarrières die potentiële en bestaande rivalen kunnen ervaren. Welke gedragingen als misbruik kunnen gekwalificeerd worden met betrekking tot het verzamelen van gegevens zal uitvoerig besproken worden. Wel kunnen ondernemingen zich – in zeer uitzonderlijke gevallen weliswaar – op een objectieve rechtvaardiging beroepen om hun gedraging te rechtvaardigen. Bijgevolg constateert het onderzoek dat artikel 102 VWEU geschikt kan zijn om Big Data gerelateerde problemen te remediëren, maar er toch heel wat tegenstrijdigheden met betrekking tot dit punt te vinden is in de rechtsleer. Bepaalde auteurs menen dat het mededingingsrecht een ongeschikt middel zou zijn om alle Big Data gerelateerde problemen zoals privacyproblemen te remediëren. Een andere strekking van de literatuur wijst er – gebaseerd op andere overwegingen - echter dat men privacy juist wel mee in het bad kan trekken gebaseerd op andere overwegingen. Het is duidelijk dat er geen eensgezindheid bestaat in de praktijk, maar recente zaken leren ons dat artikel 102 VWEU geschikt is om mededingingsbeperkende gedragingen te onderzoeken.
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Geo-blocking, which basically refers to the practice of preventing customers from accessing websites or content of the website, has become widespread in the European Union. More particularly, the most affected sector by it is the audiovisual sector. Against this background, EU consumers have not been sitting idly by. They have expressed their dissatisfaction with geo-blocking by contending that it erects virtual barriers where there should be none. Others have eased their frustrations by falling back on VPNs to circumvent these obstacles. By contrast, the stakeholders of the audiovisual industry – especially European players in the audiovisual market – have intensively lobbied against a geo-blocking ban. Their main argument is that artificially partitioning the Internet landscape through geo-blocking is indispensable to preserve the principle of copyright territoriality upon which current business models are founded. Elimination of geo-blocking would adversely affect content production and subsequently decrease consumer’s welfare. Hence, the redline of this Master’s thesis is this war of words on the geo-blocking issue. Put it differently, it investigates how cross-border access to online audiovisual content services could be secured without harming the incentives of the audiovisual industry to produce and distribute content. To answer this question, this research has been conducted as following. Firstly, it outlined the inadequacy of the legal framework prior to the adoption of the 2015 Digital Single Market Strategy to deal with the issue. Indeed, the legal framework does little to nothing to address geo-blocking per se and/or to tackle the underlying reasons for the use of it. Secondly, it observed that the Geo-blocking Regulation which entered into force in 2018 does not alter the status quo since audiovisual services are expressly left outside the scope of it. Lastly, out of the presumption that the traditional copyright-territoriality-based business model of the audiovisual industry will inevitably have to adapt to the new paradigm in the way audiovisual content is consumed and distributed, this Master’s thesis answers the research question by advocating for a threefold approach towards the geo-blocking issue. In other words, this contribution defends that an elimination of geo-blocking in the EU (and thus allowing cross-border access to online audiovisual content services) without harming the incentives of the audiovisual industry to produce and distribute content will only be feasible if the European Union adopts an incremental, cross-sectoral and proactive approach.
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- Juridische thesis: is de consumentenwelvaart als doel van het mededingingsrecht, toe aan een herevaluatie in het kader van de digitale economie? Is het noodzakelijk een nieuw mededingingsrechtelijk doel te kiezen, of volstaat het om het huidige doel te 'rebooten'? - Economische thesis: is het opleggen van interoperabiliteit als niet-structurele remedie voldoende om de eerlijke mededinging te vrijwaren?
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This Thesis shall critically assess the issues which Reflective Learning and Deep Learning algorithms pose on the enforcement of traditional EU Competition rules (Article 101 TFEU), and whether this framework is up to the task in regulating them. That is because, academics and practitioners concur that in the event that algorithms start fixing prices by themselves without the involvement of human intervention, the virtual ‘meeting of minds’ is likely not to be caught by the current laws due to the perfect forms of collusion they can reach. Further to the above, in AI cases there is no legal basis to attribute liability, which leaves the question open as to whom liability is attributed should things go wrong – is it the programmer of the algorithm, its user or both? The discussion will be supplemented with academic research, robotic case studies and surveys. As such, the tacit collusion and parallel pricing aspects will represent the focal point of this Paper.
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