Ensuring innovation through participative antitrust

Abstract

Abstract Innovation is fundamental to economic growth, competition, and consumer welfare. It involves five core elements: Creativity, risk-taking, value-addition, adoption, and destruction. When these elements are combined, they produce powerful new technologies that revolutionize the way we work, travel, interact and more. Politicians, regulators, and consumers are asking whether antitrust can adequately promote and protect competition and innovation in the digital sector. Can it ensure access to competitively important data? Can it prevent mergers that eliminate future rivals? And can it address foreclosure by incumbent service providers? This article argues that the solution does not lie in overly broad changes to legal duties, burdens and standards of proof, which could have adverse consequences. Instead, governments, agencies, and industry should cooperate to produce rules that promote innovation by digital platforms and new entrants alike. This model of participative antitrust offers a promising path forward.