Ecosystems as Quasi-essential Facilities: Should We Impose Platform Neutrality?

Abstract

The Google Shopping judgment raises the question of the possibility of attributing some of the characteristics of essential facilities to specific digital infrastructures and services. Such characteristics could lead to imposing access and neutrality obligations on digital ‘gatekeepers’ for the benefit of business partners, which may compete with some of their activities. This contribution examines the legitimacy and effectiveness of such injunctions. The aim is to examine successively the necessary scope of such obligations by questioning the place of the criterion of the indispensability of access, to consider the limits of such kind of asymmetrical regulation of competition, and to consider the possibility of addressing them through structural remedies.