Resumen de Antitrust rules and remedies against platforms' treacherous turns

Friso Bostoen, Nicolas Petit

• Digital platforms can take a ‘treacherous turn’, where they initially set advantageous terms and con-ditions only to reverse them once demand has become sticky. Transaction costs economics has longrecognised the harm caused by such opportunism, especially in the presence of relation-specificinvestments. Such investments are the norm in the platform economy, where opportunism is beingrediscovered under labels such as ‘open early, closed late’. Despite economic recognition of thephenomenon, however, antitrust law is lagging behind. Its micro-rules of liability, for example onexcessive pricing and refusal to supply, do not adequately capture treacherous turn strategies, nei-ther do related rules from contract law or sectoral regulation. Hence, we propose adopting atargeted quasi-per se rule to fill the treacherous gap. Unless the platform can advance a plausiblebusiness justification, the rule imposes a remedy freezing the previous terms in place.