Abstract
Keeping pace with new and evolving features of industrial markets, and arriving at policies that strike an appropriate relationship between market oversight and private enterprise, will require new approaches to the legal analysis of impediments to competition. The use of control over system modularity and interface access policy by platform or network operators to restrict competition in adjacent or complementary markets is a competitive restraint deserving of modernized legal analysis. Although platform operators seek to capture the efficiencies of system modularity in upstream production, they frequently adopt policies that impede the ability of customers and end-users to benefit from modularity in downstream distribution and sales. Unfortunately, traditional anticollusion and antimonopolization law remains ill equipped to address overly restrictive conduct by platform operators. Historically, tying law provided a useful legal framework for the analysis of systems issues, but current doctrine fails to deliver a coherent antitrust approach, as illustrated by a discussion of two recent cases.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.