Disruptive Technologies and Competition Law

Abstract

Technologies can change societies but also law designing the rules for living together. If technological developments go fast and deep, even disruptive effects are possible. The digitization of the last 20 years had an impact on the markets and on competition law in various respects. In a first phase online transactions became feasible. Data ownership and privacy as new values further impacted the antitrust parameters environment in a second phase. The most disruptive effects, however, have been caused by the recent and newest technologies, namely the new infrastructures (distributed ledgerDistributed ledger technologies technologies) as well as by algorithms and artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence. The contribution outlines the developments and particularly discusses the major challenges to which competition law is exposed in the present technological environment.