Program Description: On the morning of October 10, the Law & Economics Center hosted a public policy conference on Competition Among Online Platforms.

Amazon, Apple, Face Book, and Google each began by offering vastly different services and products:  online shopping, computers, social networking, and search.  Today, however, these companies compete with one another across a variety of dimensions.  This public policy conference explored the extent of this competition, and topics such as defining markets and assessing market power, lock-in, dynamic versus static concerns, and the competitive implications of open versus closed platforms.

A second panel examined the role that data collection plays for online platforms, including how data collection and privacy policies should enter into antitrust analysis, and the extent to which privacy regulation affects competition.

Agenda

Platform Structure and Antitrust Analysis

Alden Abbott, Director, Global Patent Law and Competition Strategy, BlackBerry and Adjunct Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law

Daniel O’Connor, Senior Director, Public Policy & Government Affairs, Computer and Communications Industry Association

Mark Bohannon, Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Global Public Policy, Red Hat, Inc.

Hal J. Singer, Managing Director and Principal, Navigant Economics

Moderator: Adam Thierer, Senior Research Fellow, Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Platform Competition and Data Collection: The Intersection of Privacy and Antitrust?

Maureen K. Ohlhausen, Commission, Federal Trade Commission

Peter P. Swire, Nancy J. and Lawrence P. Huang Professor in the Law and Ethics, Ernest Scheller, Jr. College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology

Emilio W. Cividanes, Partner, Venable LLP

Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law

Moderator: James C. Cooper, Director, Research & Policy, Law & Economics Center and Lecturer in Law, George Mason University School of Law