Prof. Rod Sims, Chair of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (2011/22): Digital Markets
"The most feared man in Australian business" (AFR).
Two fundamentally new EU & UK proactive, experimental approaches to tailoring competition in digital markets not only are learning intensively from each other (see e.g., a paper comparing the DMA & DMCC https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...) – but also from the best practices around the world. One of the most interesting pieces of such asymmetric regulation allowing prudent comparison and transposition is Australian asymmetric approach to designing a mechanism by which the largest platforms are required to share some of their revenues with news media organisations.
One may agree or disagree with this supposedly compensatory modality from a normative perspective, but most appreciate the technical juristic and behaviouristic elements of the triggers designed and implemented by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission ACCC in their News Media Bargaining Code.
Remarkably, in the spirit of the participative approach, before the new rules started being applied another law has been introduced in Australia, allowing an exemption from the scope of the Bargaining Code for those undertakings which voluntarily contribute to the values and objectives of Australian media landscape. Both platforms for which (essentially) the News Media Bargaining Code was designed have made such contributions by entering in a number of bi- and multilateral agreements with media content owners (the substance of these agreements is pretty much identical to the scope of the News Media Bargaining Code) and both platforms have received thereby exemptions from the Code (yes, we hear many PR-songs written about the fact that no platform has been designated under the new rules, portraying it as a failure of the new regime – but now we now the reason why no designation was made). Thus it is not even a threat of arbitration – but merely a threat of designation – which facilitates meaningful compliance with objectives.
To discuss the rationale of the Code and the policy as well as to look at various other aspects of the Australian approach to regulating competition in digital markets, I have invited Rod Sims – a chairperson of the ACCC during the entire digital decade (from 2011 to 2022) and who had been among the main protagonists of the new policy. We had a very fruitful dialogue, touching upon variety of other competition-related issues. Prof. Sims, inter alia, explained why the News Media Bargaining Code should be seen as a pro-competition approach to address systemic market failures rather than a (merely) kind of copyright-based rationale of rent redistribution.
Hope colleagues will enjoy and students will find useful.
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The Digital Markets Research Hub is an independent academic initiative aiming at scrutinising the functioning of competition/regulation in digital markets. We host one-to-one interviews with leading policymakers, regulators and practitioners. We also organise online mini-workshops inviting high-profile experts and academics in various fields of digital competition law & policy to discuss the most vibrant issues of the ongoing regulatory reforms in digital markets.
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