Antimonopoly Academic Grantee for project "Regulating US-Based Big Tech Beyond Local Markets: Antitrust for Africa"

Georgieva, Zlatina (Recipient) & Kigwiru, Vellah (Recipient)

Economic Public Law

Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)

Description

Please note this project, awarding 25 000 USD, for a duration of 2 years, is managed by the Technical University Munich (I could not find how to change the managing organization under heading 'Prizes managed by'). A project description and a link to the awarding institution are provided under heading 'Documents and Files'

Awarded date	21 Feb 2022
Degree of recognition	Regional
Granting Organisations	Economic Security Project

Keywords

antitrust
digital markets
development
Global South
Africa

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Documents & Links

This project builds on the realization that big tech companies –Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft– concentration of power and anti-competitive conduct is not a problem limited to developed countries alone. It is a global issue that requires a global solution and global enforcement. The big tech companies, for instance, are increasingly marking inroads in emerging markets. In Africa, unfortunately, recent scholarly work shows that big tech companies are taking advantage of unregulated territories and disadvantaged populations for digital experiments and data extraction to increase their global market dominance, especially through zero-rating offers, which removes data costs associated with certain content. Additionally, African competition authorities are grappling with various enforcement challenges specific to digital markets: jurisdictional questions resulting from big tech companies having no physical presence on the continent, the inadequacy of the current enforcement tools, and limited expertise. In the absence of African competition agencies monitoring big tech’s market entry strategies, the latter are more likely to increase their concentration of power and abuse their dominant position unnoticed. In this project, we venture into a search for a solution in the context of African competition agencies and the lesson they can draw from the US and EU digital markets regulatory policies.