Ahron Peskin, Senior Consultant at Moloney Search published an article with Professor Philip Marsden.
"Professor Philip Marsden is a Professor of Law & Economics at the College of Europe, Deputy Chair of the Bank of England’s Enforcement Decision Making Committee and a member of both the Regulatory Decisions and Case Decisions Committees of the Financial Conduct Authority and the Payment Systems Regulator. He was appointed by the Chancellor to the Treasury’s Digital Competition Experts Panel, which produced the ‘Furman Review: Unlocking Digital Competition’.
Professor Marsden is an authority on competition law and recently debated at the United Nations the role competition authorities and governments worldwide can play in navigating online harms and competition problems, in particular when dealing with the tech giants such as Google or Facebook. We sat down with Professor Marsden to further explore these themes.
MSL: Thank you for joining us Professor Marsden. When discussions are had about how to explore and improve our relationships with the world’s biggest digital platforms, people very rarely think about competition authorities and the role they can play. What makes competition authorities important in this discussion?
Philip Marsden: The more political concerns about losses of privacy, online harms, abuse of democratic processes and misuse of data are real for any digital platform, but they have the largest effects when platforms have market power – and it is then that competition authorities have the clearest role. Competition authorities are usually concerned about economic harms, relating to exploitative pricing or exclusion and discrimination. Those harms are also being alleged of tech platforms. To a large extent, competition authorities have the investigative, analytical and enforcement tools to address such abuses of market power, and this makes competition authorities highly relevant in a government's approach to curbing these and other online harms."
