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'The European Commission is to contract a study on the gatekeeping, or market-dominating, power of digital platforms in a bid to gather evidence which could feed into the upcoming Digital Services Act, documents seen by EURACTIV reveal.
A recent call for tenders, detailing an upper limit of €600,000 for the study, states that the report should include “robust data and insights as regards issues linked with significant network effects [and] gatekeeping power.”
The study should also provide “assistance in support of the assessment of different options” for how the Commission could redress the competitive disparities between dominant digital platforms and new market entrants, in an economy characterised by “strong winner takes all effects,” the document states.
The difficulty for new entrants to gain momentum in the digital economy has resulted in a market in which ‘Platforms with Significant Network Effects acting as Gatekeepers’ are able to “act as private regulators setting the rules of the game on the markets they control, which are critical markets for a very large number of users and SMEs and are central to the digital economy,” the Commission states.
More broadly, the report should contain a number of case studies which focus on six fields in the online platform economy, including self-preferencing in terms of dual roles for online platforms; data access; the locking into digital identity services for users; interoperability of services; employing data holdings in other markets; information asymmetries in data gathering that could result in ‘high switching costs’ for the users of certain social media platforms and search engines.'

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