Consumer Law and Policy Seminars:
W(h)ither Competition Law in the New Economic Order?

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The global technocratic consensus about the form and function of competition law is breaking down along several fault lines. On the one hand, numerous expert and competition agency reports have cast doubt on the ability of the traditional form of competition law to deal with the apparent entrenchment of large digital gatekeepers fueled by network externalities and sitting on mountains of data . On the other hand, a combination of industrial and geopolitical considerations have led to a revival of industrial policy ambitions by governments in digital markets, critical sectors and beyond. Sometimes such considerations have affected the way in which competition decision makers have exercised their functions. These developments have led to concerns about competition law being subverted, instrumentalized or altogether supplanted to regulation and industrial policy.

While the United States and the European Union competition law rules and practices have long been transplanted to other jurisdictions, in the new economic order their templates are not necessarily followed. In this talk, Professor Svetiev will survey experiences from the Asia Pacific region in the interaction of competition and industrial considerations to outline several conceptual and institutional models for such interaction, ranging from the static and protectionist all the way to the dynamic and conditional. Finally, he will argue that some competition decision makers in our region are implementing experimentalist institutional arrangements to highlight their limits and their potential evolution.

About the Speaker

Professor Yane Svetiev holds the Chair in Market Regulation and Private Law at the University of Sydney Law School. He has previously held faculty appointments at Bocconi University (Milan, Italy), the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and at Brooklyn Law School (New York, USA), as well as visiting appointments at the Hertie School of Governance, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, FGV Direito SP, Humboldt University and the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law among others. In addition to his academic appointments, he has served as litigation associate at Cravath, Swaine and Moore LLP (New York, USA) and as judicial associate at the High Court of Australia.

He is the author of the Experimentalist Competition Law and the Regulation of Markets (Hart/Bloomsbury) and the Eighth Edition of Corones’ Competition Law in Australia (Thomson Reuters). He is also chief investigator for an Australian Research Council funded project on transnational peer reviews in market regulation.