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Vice President Cyril Hariton Joins Competition Panel, Highlights Economic Consideration Related to Third-Party Access for Digital Infrastructures
Vice President Cyril Hariton joined a Concurrences panel entitled “Access, Innovation, and Competition in the Digital Age.” The panel was moderated by Aymeric de Moncuit (Mayer Brown) and featured Giuseppe Conte (European Commission), Tero Louko (Google), and Laila Medina (Court of Justice of the European Union).
Much of the panel discussion focused on the judgment by the Court of Justice of the European Union, on questions raised in the context of a dispute between Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and Italy’s competition and market authority. In its ruling, the court determined that an owner’s refusal to ensure interoperability between their open digital infrastructure – that is, one not built exclusively for its owner’s needs – and a third-party app may constitute an abuse of a dominant position, even if that infrastructure isn’t essential to the third party.
As the conversation shifted to the “semi-open” nature of some infrastructures, Dr. Hariton, who specializes in industrial organization and competition economics, encouraged focusing on the competitive effects of specific access regimes instead of the form of the infrastructure that third-parties seek access to. Dr. Hariton recommended that regulators should focus on how the infrastructure owners’ business models can incorporate specific forms of third-party access, and what the potential effects of that access are likely to be on the incentives to invest and innovate.
Dr. Hariton further made the point that increased regulatory scrutiny of open digital infrastructures could result in a decline in investments aimed at improving them, even in cases when the added scrutiny does not lead to the development of more closed infrastructures.
Associated People
Cyril Hariton
Vice PresidentDr. Hariton specializes in the application of industrial organization and competition economics to merger control, antitrust and competition, state aid, and regulatory matters, including extensive work in large-scale merger investigations and competition litigation before the European Commission and national competition authorities. He previously served as an economist at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP). Dr. Hariton has advised on more than 75 merger reviews, including those of Halliburton/Baker Hughes, Dow/DuPont, Bayer/Monsanto, and Salesforce/Slack by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), as well as antitrust cases involving Intel, Servier, and Glaxo Wellcome. His experience includes work on state aid, damages estimation, and regulatory proceedings, as well as work on Digital Services Act fee challenges and foreign subsidies regulation. Dr. Hariton also brings distinctive expertise as a forensic IT expert, having assisted in multiple inspections and investigations. He has published in journals including the Review of Industrial Organization, the Journal of Public Economic Theory, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, the Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Revue Économique, and Recherches Économiques de Louvain, and has contributed to European Commission consultations and newsletters. Dr. Hariton previously served as an assistant professor at Toulouse Business School and as a research fellow at UCLouvain.