Network effects: Game Changer in EU competition Law

In the last 20 years, economic research into platform markets has expanded. At the heart of these markets lie various types of network externalities or network effects. However, whereas these effects have mainly been analysed by economists as phenomena to clari-fy changes in value for end-users of particular products, they worked their way into European competition law as a legal concept. By and large, in the absence of specific rules, the effects have a game-changing influence on the application of competition law to platform markets. Possibly, from the competi-tion law element of the undertaking, to, definitely, the ruling on anti-competitive effects, network effects have been employed by the European Commission and the European Courts to decide competition cases. This article alerts this development, finding, on the whole, that European competition law enforcement has a strong anti-competitive sen-timent towards platform markets.