Bruegel Event Recordings

In the first session, the panellists discussed how to establish a fair and competitive Digital Single Market, in particular a fair and competitive platform economy. Since the crucial factors for success for digital platforms are trust and big data, the trade-off between both determine the efficiency of the entire industry. This trade-off is embodied in privacy, and unfortunately empirically there is no clear-cut answer to how much privacy is needed for people’s welfare. The panellists also discussed the role of competition policy and regulation as complementary tools, one as a credible deterrent and the other as a specific way to tailor policy to social objectives. For competition policy, several features of the platform economy were highlighted that make the situation particular, notably the winner-take-all markets, the first-mover advantage, the network effect, the cross-markets leverage that scale brings and other bundling. Due to the fragmentation of the EU market, there are cases where national players