Article
The Legal Future of Digital Entrepreneurship: Comparative Regulation of Platform Monopolies and Competition Law in the United States, European Union, and India*
The quickly growing digital platform economies have led to an unprecedented merging of antitrust doctrine with competition law and technology governance among the three largest regulatory jurisdictions on the planet: The United States, the European Union, and India. The following article provides a detailed comparative legal overview of how each jurisdiction has, or is in the process of, developing its regulatory framework responding to increasing market power by platform gatekeepers like Alphabet (Google), Meta Platforms, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. This paper based on a synthesized corpus of 63 primary and secondary sources analyzes both the legislative foundation, significant enforcement actions to date, newly-evolving digital-specific regulations, and a theoretical basis for platform competition economics.Our analysis suggests that, though the European Union has pursued the most systematic and aggressive posture through Digital Markets Act (2022) and other complementary instruments, 30+ years of an ex post antitrust enforcement operating under a consumer welfare standard leaves the United States mired in an approach critics argue is ill-suited for the algorithmic economy. By contrast, India is still building a third model- one that picks and chooses from the cotton model and the starch model whilst also accounting for Indian market realities, where multinationals own platform intermediaries in sectors worth trillions of dollars, servicing over 1 billion consumers. The paper also assesses the suitability of current competition law regimes to tackle unique characteristics of digital platform markets including network effects, data monopolization, zero-price markets, tipping dynamics and barriers to multi-homing.Finally, the paper closes with an integrated policy framework for convergent regulation; it argues that the fate of digital entrepreneurship is closely intertwined with national and supranational regulatory institutions' ability to strike a sustainable balance between innovation incentives on one hand, and structural equity, market contestability and preservation of competitive pluralism on the other. Nine unique data visualizations along with four comparability charts complement the analysis.