Måttet på konkurrenskraft - Är mekanismerna för anmälan av företagskoncentrationer ändamålsenliga för digitala plattformar?

Sammanfattning: Online platforms are two-sided or multi-sided markets that enable the gathering of different customer groups. For instance, these groups may consist of marketers and end-users. A few of these platforms, such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, have consolidated significant market power in recent years. Merger control is the most effective tool against oligopolistic market structures in competition law. In order for it to function, it is key that mergers that pose competitive harm are subject to review. This purpose of this thesis is to assess whether the Swedish legal framework for merger notification is appropriate for the use in merger control in online platform markets. The provisions are reviewed in the context of the purpose of konkurrenslagen (2008:579), which is to remove and counteract obstacles for effective competition. The essay also includes an outlook to German and Austrian price-based notification thresholds for the purpose of discussing whether such provisions could favor Swedish legislation. The turnover-based thresholds allow strong enterprises to absorb smaller companies who have not yet generated turnover. In digital plattforms, the turnover is not universally indicative of the competitive potential that resides in a company. This is at least in part due to network effects and the use of Big Data. The issue is partially compensated by the Swedish Competition Authority’s powers to impose notifications requirements, but this is not the case where the combined turnover of the parties is less than 1 billion SEK. The ’particular grounds’ rule has additional issues of being unpredictable for participants in the market. My assessment is that a transaction-based threshold, introduced as a complement to the ordinary rules, could favor the Swedish notification system in that it would provide a more future-oriented measure of market power. Such a threshold could be introduced in combination with national or global turnover-based thresholds. In case of the latter, the rule could suitably be accompanied by a qualitative criteria addressing the domestic operations of the company, such as the ones in Germany and Austria.