Redefining Abuse of Dominance in Digital Era: A Focus on Emerging Market

Abstract

This paper explores issues linked with abuse of dominance in emerging markets, focusing on the interaction between digitalization and the global push toward decarbonization. Emerging markets face challenges unique to themselves: underdeveloped frameworks, limited capacities to enforce, and dependence on dominant foreign firms in digital as well as traditional sectors. The study discusses how data-driven monopolies, algorithmic collusion, and sustainability initiatives can enhance or obfuscate dominance abuse. Using qualitative methodology, this paper will explore cases, legal frameworks, and academic literature to recommend new ideas. The ideas include data portability; enhanced transparency in algorithms used by online platforms; and what might be described as a “green dominance” doctrine balancing fairness in markets against environmental policy objectives. By responding to those challenges that competition law should adapt for the newly emerging markets, this research underlines avenues toward promoting competitive equity and sustainable development.
Despite the fact that the topic of digital dominance in the EU and the US is currently widely researched, and the platforms of policy-making agencies, including the OECD and UNCTAD, have begun to work on this topic, the present-day body of research lacks an emerging, market-specific framework of identifying the abuse of dominance by digital platforms. Existing literature focuses on how to adapt classical ex-post abuse instruments to the context of multi-sided data-driven markets or studies new ex-ante regimes based on the EU Digital Markets Act, but often lacks an explanation of the interaction between these two layers in the developing world with different structural characteristics and low enforcement capacity. There is a paucity of empirical studies on the impact of platform concentration on the outcomes of development, including SME engagement, digital industrialisation, and local innovation, which are still tied to the legal aspects of abuse in a rather narrow consumer-welfare and price-effect manner. Furthermore, the majority of such proposals import trials and cures of developed jurisdictions without coherent adaptation to institutional constraints, data asymmetries and the necessity to encourage digital investment in developing economies, and normative issues regarding how to restrain carefully the excessive power of gatekeepers and encourage innovation and inclusive development remain open.