Competition Policy Response to Digital Based Business Expansion in Brazil

This note discusses recent developments at the Brazilian Antitrust Authority – CADE – on handling digital markets and platform cases. It provides a brief view of official reports and jurisprudence, also bringing the perspective for the coming years. Despite the absence of institutional changes directed to digital markets, CADE undertook extensive efforts to properly assess such mergers and abuse of dominance cases. The results are visible and important given Brazil’s position as a developing economy. Considering the BRICS countries, CADE is an early adopter of the concepts and evolution is visible. On the other hand, abuse of dominance case analysis is still in earlier steps and divided in its legal standard. When discussing digital platform antitrust there are many global challenges with no simple answers. CADE is up to the task, with transparency and engagement with the antitrust community.

By Eduardo Pontual Ribeiro, Svetlana Golovanova, Camila Pires-Alves & Marcos Puccioni de Oliveira Lyra¹

I. INTRODUCTION

The investigation of business practices of digital platforms in merger and antitrust investigations requires the adoption of new economic analysis tools. They should consider multi-sidedness, cross-platform network effects, the role of relative prices, information-based technologies effects, dynamic efficiency, and other considerations. These platform features have been discussed in economic literature² while the application of these theories in