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Amsterdam School of Economics Amsterdam School of Economics

Amsterdam Center for Digital Competition

The Amsterdam Center for Digital Competition (ACDC) is an academic research hub at the University of Amsterdam dedicated to exploring the regulation of digital markets. It brings together scholars from economics, law, and technology to analyze and address challenges posed by digital platforms and our evolving digital economies.

Comprehensive Legislation in the EU

In recent years, the regulation of Big Tech companies has become a focal point globally, with significant developments in the European Union (EU). The EU has introduced comprehensive legislation, such as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA), to ensure fair competition and enhance accountability among large digital platforms. These laws were in large part inspired by landmark antitrust cases against some of the big tech platforms, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon. These laws complement the existing antitrust laws, aiming to prevent anti-competitive practices and increase transparency in content moderation and advertising.

Invasive and Specialized Regulatory Interventions

The regulatory interventions are invasive, specialized, and precise. For instance, the EU has mandated that Apple open its iOS operating system to improve compatibility with competing technologies, promoting interoperability with non-Apple devices and applications. Similarly, Meta (formerly Facebook) has faced scrutiny over its "pay or consent" model, which requires users to either consent to data tracking or pay a subscription fee for an ad-free experience. These actions reflect the EU's commitment to enforcing regulations that promote fair competition and protect consumer interests in the digital sphere. Yet their effectiveness and sufficiency are constantly questioned, and must be in such fast moving.

ACDC: Contributing to Digital Market Governance

The ACDC aims to contribute by providing rigorous academic research, policy evaluations, and insights into the implications of such regulations, assessing their effectiveness, and contributing to policy debates on digital market governance.

Our team

Sander Onderstal is Professor of Strategy & Markets. His research focuses primarily on the design of allocation mechanisms, including auctions, procurement, fund-raising, and waiting lists. He develops game theory models to analyze such mechanisms and tests those on the basis of lab and field experiments. His latest work on the ACDC topic includes predatory practices in markets with network effects and self-preferencing in the context of online auctions.

Maarten Pieter Schinkel is Professor of Competition Economics and Regulation. He specializes in competition policy, with research focused on antitrust and market regulation, and the intersection of industrial organization and competition law enforcement. His latest work on the ACDC topic includes a proposal for ‘smart cuts’ in Big Techs to stimulate platform competition.

Amit Zac is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam's Center for Law and Economics. He specializes in competition law, economic inequality, and empirical legal studies of Marketing and acts as the coordinator of the Centre for Responsible Consumption. His latest work on the ACDC topic includes: Studying Dark patterns, compliance with EU digital privacy regulations, and competition in the search engine market among LLMs suppliers.

Events

Stimulating public debate

Our members contribute to public debate via media appearances.

90 percent of websites ignore cookie regulations, discovered Amsterdam-based researcher Amit Zac: 'A staggering amount' (in Dutch)

Contact

Send an email to digitalcompetition@uva.nl.