Tying and bundling by online platforms -Distinguishing between lawful expansion strategies and anti-competitive practices

摘要

The assessment of tying and bundling practices under Art. 102 TFEU in the case of online platforms will require adjusting current practice to correspond to their technical complexity and multi sided nature. Although the current framework may appear suitable to deal with this kind of abuses, The recent cases against Google show that there is still much uncertainty in practice. Therefore this article seeks to address the matter of tying and bundling by online platforms and provide guidance with regard to the application of the current legal framework to such complex cases in order to prevent false finding in ongoing and future cases.This article shows that finding an abuse of dominance in platform related cases requires great diligence as the joint provision of products or services and market power leveraging by platforms is an inherent part of their commercial evolvement. In this regard the article offers insight on how to distinguish between anticompetitive tying and bundling practices and legitimate expansion strategies. In order to do so, the article discusses how such practices can manifest and how they should be addressed under the framework of EU competition law in light of the similar competitive concerns they share with non-platform cases. (C) 2020 Daniel Mandrescu. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)