Give me a structure for my thesis based on the information I have so far and the direction I want to go: # Techno Feudalism Summary

Yanis makes a simple yet interesting comparison of cloud capital to the field, which was earlier valuable to landowners in the feudal era. A company's clout capital is the new way of owning and generating capital. It feeds itself - meaning, each user contributes with data that is provided by the Cloud company. With the ingenious algorithm, DDS are personalized and targeted to the users.

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What is the importance of the internet to capitalism?

Yanis explains that capitalism emerged from the privatization of common lands, and when “owners of capital goods (…) acquire the power to command people and nations” (page 89, 4th para), the same is happening with clout 9, according to him. The author defines cloud capital as a machine of “vast production and behaviour modification”. Why? because it influences human decisions leading towards the most profit-oriented decision, which is, in our opinion, the essence of capitalism and its ideals.

Yanis also defends that, unlike in true old-fashioned capitalism, in cloud feudalism, capitalists have to pay fees so that cloud owners can sell their goods. So, not even capitalists can order around people, workers to generate profit; they have to lease the cloud's land to have access to their trade and customers. “Capitalism is receding” page 91.

Optional Profit?

Yannis gives the example of 2020 in the UK, where the news predicted a far worse result than what was actually page 93. Yanis says this was the first time that capitalism detached from cloud capital, but I argue that this is exactly how capitalism plays. Yes, stocks were bought, money was printed, but the outcome was less damaging (on paper), but it doesn't mean that the paradox is different, i think is the same as always, but now more rapid and adaptive.

Big tech essentially invested with the central bank's money in their cloud capital. They contracted employees to reboo it. The pandemic unleashed the cloud capital era.

Is cloud capital truly revolutionary?

This new format doesn't depend on banks. Digital wallets do the trick, Yanis says, “a type of capital, funded by state monies and reproduced by citizens’ free labour, intensifies your power to extract surplus value from proletarians who are working for shrinking wages under worsening conditions”.

Nonetheless, we have to agree with Yanis when it comes to the 2008 crisis. Inequality solidified and seems to get wider because the poor saw their incomes decreasing while the big businesses intensified theirs. Again, to us, this is what capitalism is about. And it's getting worse at this moment. We see big techs commanding the trend that has been long aged - page 99.

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The tradicionalistic capitalistic system the profit was the main goal. No sistema tradicional for ex a aple vende o iphone e o lucro é a diferência do lucro da produção. Mas a appstore for example controla as apps and because they have that control its like they are feudal lords, or um terreno virtual.

Page 116 - Why is it important to define this new era and use the appropriate name? Well, its implortant to word it correctly because the way we relate to it and what we can do to stop it and perpetuate or overthrw it cames from the way we see a and called it.

YYanis defends that the rent is now more important than profit. He argues that is important to call that way so that humanity sees/opens their eyes before the change. He agrees that as we stand capitalist rulls the world, important institutions, legislations, parliament. He also defends that calling this a platform capitalist or rent capitalism is watering down the reality of change.

This new form of capital is different - it has the ability to “reproduce itself” without cost or effort, turning all of us into cloud serfs.

An alternative to the system we know:

Profit would stop being a driving force, the workers would be shareholders able to chose their managers etc - the workers’ pay would come out as revenues. “Markets and concentrated wealth would lose their “ importance over the communities, allowing us, collectively, to decide how to provide health, education, and protection of the environment”.

What's the difference between profit and rent?

According to Yanis, profit is subject to competition, while rent is not. ( I don´t think this is true at all). So, in the capitalisic era, people create things like job phones so that other people can improve uppon it and afterwards the competition comes in and possibly dictates the prices - em linhas gerais. While with rent, the land owner does not have to do anything, and competition benefits them in ways not possible before. The more entrepinesid are the others around that erea, the higher the rent goes up.

Brand Loyalty:

The power to increase prices without losing clients - Apple (page 123)

Iphone oppened up for the new rent, acording to Yanis- cloud rent. Apple store, a third party (developers) was invited to develop and sell their services in the Apple store, which could only be accessed to iPhone users. And in exchange to have their apps there, 30% of their revenues. page 125

Ficamos na página 127- Ai mana não me apetece fazer NADA.

Yanis mentions that capitalism is somehow diying down with its own strecture and empowered with the shift of cloud rent and less cloud money, eh eh.

He opens this new chapter stating that, unlike feudal lords, the cloudalists invest in the highest of high-tech capital. Again, unlike the feudal lords that were born into their lands, the cllodulists had to built them from skretch.

But in what exactly did they invest?

Yanis argues these things are not comodoties since they are not meant to be sold (as one should be, in return of profit). Their intent is not to sell in return of the profit but rather to influence and capture our attention. - page 130 - MONOPOLIES come into play

What about competition?

Yanis says there is no real competition: TikTok developed a new system from Facebook, “created a new cloud tief (…) and a new online experience” - page 31. Dysney plus offered a different set of movies than netflix and apple uses information from their Iphone users to tailor into their products and prevent other cloudolists to rob their clients.

Yanis defends that the stagnation crisis and cost of living cannot be explained without technofeudalism. He also explains that crisis will be deeper, and the cycle that empowered cloudalists will continue: Banis will print money for investment, , eabling more extraction and less investment and so on” - page 136 - How does it support this- a Swiss bank report concluded that % billionaires increased their wealth between April and July 2020 by 27.5% while millions of people were losing their jobs and streggling to scrape by.

National and local economies were underinvested and as a result of international blockage supply goods: inflation. Unions’ power is mostly watered down compared to the 70s, when great unions could push for a salary increase above the inflation rate - YUMMMJMYYYYY

China makes big companies pay for the country's debt and deficits to balance their impact and lower inflation. But what happens to countries that don't do that? Big companies will gather super profits - page 138 - And he calls this initial phase of the technofeudalism and what the world is going through as the Great inflation.

Yanis argues that technofeudalism is here to stay “because of its immense structural power, to extract vast clouds of rent from every society on Earth, remains completely undiminished”.

E agora o homem falar da nova cold war between China and USA - should we call it warm war??

Technofeudalism with Chinese characteristics

Dark Deal: America invested in Asian brands and fabrics - they shifted their industry into Asia, and in return, Asia had sufficient demand from the states. This Deal was made by the Chinese ruling class and an American one - the problem? The working class se fodeu with precarious wages. In the USA workers suffered from underfunding. In China, they suffered from overinvestment. A lot of migration towards Chinese capitals and cities. Just poverty on both ends.

Yanis é incrivel. He writes about underdeveloped countries on their dependence on the dollar and how that perpetuates neo- neo-neo-neo-colonialism.

page 164:

The spectre of technofeudalism over the global south, the planet:

Yannis and I agree that a part of capitalism are the recurrent crises: oil crises 1973 and 1979, other crisis in 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2008.

70% of european and asian profits were diverted towards the U.S. So EU is under the American dollar and why is that? the big capitalists that participate in this game might wish the eu would be free from the checkles from the u.s but truly they benefit from it - the demande generated by Americas trade deficit. Later on those capitalist will trade that defict and turn them into U.S assets.

If this proves to right the EU is in trouble since theirs no Big tech company that can compete to those at play from the U.S and because they can´t produce gas and bla bla, europe is irrelevant but at least there is money enough to sustain the people and their basic needs. The same cant be said for countries on the global south, Asia and Africa where governments are left with two inhuman choices. Default on their dollars debts, which means they will not be able to sustain their people. Or get another dollar loan and sell their essential sactors, water electricity… In all cases these so called developing countries have no choice that submerging their own countries into undervelopment.

And the second by increase food prices and fuel prices and starve their people. - page 166

Global south is going to be divided to pick a side on this war between China and U.S.

page 172 segundo paragrafo

Fun fact - “the only political force that can do anything to keep the cloudalists in check and thus the hope of democracy alive is the chinese communist party.” - page 173

Democracy is also suffering

Technofeudalism s algorithm are known to reinforce partriarchy, streotypes and pre-existing oppressions, those who are most vulneralbe - girls, the mentally ill, the marginalized and the poor.” - O primeiro paragrafo da pag 178

Page 181 partes que estão sublinhadas podem ser o ponto fulcral da tese. ou o segundo even, how does one break up Amazon, Paypal or Tesla today?

fiquei na pág 184

Democratised companies:

Yanis presents this fascinating alternative system where every employee is a share-holder of the company they work at. Workers could not sell those shares nor lease them. This share, would give a voting power to each employee, where all decisions would have to taken collectivly. Including the division of companies post tax revenue into revenew 4 slices. This would allow employees to decide their companie would spend on different slices, especially their remuneration.

(o homem explica muito bem nas pag 194, 195 e 196). All of this would allow employees liberation from their managers and it would ignite structural changes.

Profits and wages would not be different.

Page 197 tem que pertencer a whatever the fuck this thesis is - “The larger the Firm, and the more cloud capital it employs, the greater the rent it extract from a socuety whose markets malfunction as a result”

The so called democratized companies Yanis proposes are more consistent with competition law parameters. This way paves the way for true competition and inovation to florish.

In doing so os Mark Zuckerbergs of this life would see their power confined in the only share they own and decisions would have to fall under the majority (fallow employees that are equals.

In this way the algorithms at the center would be democratized as well, within their own company which could translate in a decrease cloud capitals power.

“The one-employee-one-share-one-vote system has revolutionaire effects: It brings to an end share and labour markets and the Empire of Capital, it democratises workplaces and organically diminishes the size of conglomorates.

• Controversial point - Social Accountability Act (page 198) - Muito valioso segundo paragrafo Sistema Alternativo que protege a utilização dos dados das pessoas

The idea of this act is way more corrective and severe than any measure competition law has seen so far - “ If a companys rating falls consistently below a certain thereshold a public inquise would result may result in the companies deregistration” or even “social protection is afforded by the termination of “free services”

Parei na página 202 -

A cloud Rebellion to overthrow technofeudalism:

Cloud mobilazation - “Global action targeting one cloudalist company at the time” - page 209

An international coalition of trade unions calling upon amazon warehouse works wordwilde to stay away for one day” combining “enough useres and costumers globally not to visit the Amazon website just for one day”.

This concerted action could prove to be enought to lower amazons share price “in ways that no tradicional action could achieve”.

With this solution we would have “minimal personal sacrifice delivering large collective and personal gains”. And it could be enough to disrupt the power/grip that cloudalists haver over billions of people”.

“The cloud takes-but the cloud also gives to those who want to reclaim freedom and democracy. It is up to them, to us, to decide, and to prove, which is greater”

• Some of my questions are that for the end of the genocide against palestine a lot of international ongs and movements have called for the boycott of plenty of brands. Including Mc donalds for instance - i know this is more of a capitalistic company and not so much a cloud one- in Malaysia they were sucessful by doing so however the damage seems very diminuished. So how can we expected that people in our society would be able to have small inconviniences for cases they barely understand?
• Understanding is another great poy, as it was mentioned in the book, cloudalists control us, in so many levels, including our behaviour and even our beliefs. How can we mobilase consumers when they seem not to understand the problem and the goal?
• Miners and other workers had at least the realization of their conditions. And that gave them common ground, where, in our current society cloudalists seem to have such of an impact to where people no longer question their conditions and become complacent.

A shift that we are seing is the need for change. Siri lanka was a prime example of such mobilisation which was conducted by youngsters.

Page 212
In conclusion according to Yanis Varoufakis, capitalism was replaced by a “new serfdom” that is far worse than capitalism. However this new system (and the internet) also give opportunity to achieve the dream of leisure, freedom and true competition. “A chance of cloud rebellion”.

Karl Marx, coined capitalism as the “allienation” of the means of production which meant that the proletarian did not have a saying in decisions that had a direct impact. Now, Yanis, makes the brilliant comparasion saying that thecnhofeudalism is the “allienation” of our minds. “Every proletarian is turning into a cloud prole during working hours and cloud serf the rest of the time”. “To own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectivelly.

Also good thing i might have found the little connectors and jooiin them all - bc less competition is what we are talking about - Technofeudalism - bigger monopolies - law inneficiency - impact - how do we change

$$$$

why is this all so relevant and important?

The answer is simple. Not only is important to understand how this new global shift is going to affect us, economically, but is now increasinlgy more important to understand the great power of Techno “bros” companies. Its worht mentioning the platforms that are so used are also tools that can control our behaviour, change society and even end up with capitalism how we know it but can pose a threat towards democracy.

Competition law, is such a vital field not only to promote innovation and competition itself but to balance and regulate these bodies that are now concentrated in few people. Later on chapter we are going to present the example of meta´s murge with instagram (???). Not only these platforms can make us surfs and vassouls but they can modulate and influence political decisions. Of course, in favour of those who hold power over these platforms, such as Mark Zuckemburgs, Elon Musk and even worse. We see now the far right is increasing in previous established democracies. So, more than never competition law can be the answer to ensure that our world is not wind up in a big monopoly controled by cloudowners.

How do all of this connect?

Ecosystems and competition law in theory and practice (meter as referências bem) - Michael g. Jacobides and Loannis Lianos

Cusumano and Gawer, 2013; Parker and Van Alstyne, 2016:

In 2010, there was a shift on the market. Previously, “the top five firms in terms of capitalization shifted from giants of industry and finance” to big techs, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.

And nowadays, the market has completly changed. Not only in ways previous talked about (profit being replaced by rent) but these big companies have now “multiproducts webs that drive customer lock-in” (Hagiu and Wright). This means that within each big company there are ecosystems where products are only compatible with same brand products, creating dependence and concentration of customors and markets.

And here comes a new concept, ecosystemss, that in our opinion is intrinsically linked with the technofeudalism theory and hyper monopolies.

Most strategy literature points out that ecosystems more often than not, depend on platforms, which act as a middleman for the actors and possibly end servers (Cohen, 2017)

Other authors (eg Petit and Teece, 2021) defend that the digital enviroment, is inherently competitive. There argument tends to overlooks “extradionary profits to try to contain competitve behaviour” (QUOTE DA PAG 1201 ou 2 do pdf). The sucess is explained by companies cabilities and those should not be seen as competitive dominance.

n we consider this theory, we must also question that, even if the companies achieve extradionary results based on merits only, nothing assure nothing assure us that dominant firms are not going to abuse their dominant position. In this direction Crowford (2021), afirms that companies might try to innnovate in ways that result on the exclusion of future competitors and using lock in customers strategies.

M.G Jacobides and i. Loans, conclude that is important that regulators should proactively establish ways where firms have to act in a way that ecosystems are able to be challanged, even for future competitors and warrant that orchestrators do not abuse their position.

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Various relations/Ecosystems: A perceber

Interecosystems - Between ecosystems relations, such as Apple vs Android

Interactions between a firm that holds an ecosystem and independent firms

Intra-ecosystem competition - Relations with firms that offer potentially substitutes within the same ecosystem (Bourreau, 2020)

Vertical intra-ecosystem competition - Joint collaboration (between ecosystem participants and orchestrators)

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Facebook's Acquisition of WhatsApp:

-Maybe podemos usar este caso como exemplo prime porque tudo o que mencionarmos teremos que saber por isso é mais inteligente mencionar poucos casos mas sabe-los muito bem.

Jenny (2021), argues that Facebook´s aquisition had the goal to eliminate a future competitor that could disput the dominant player. Not only that, but facebook aquisition like other tecnhological take place to solodify the competitive dominace of one of them. Not only that, but we see an opportunity of greater acess to information/data - in this case, with whatsaap facebook has acess to plenty of conversations, creating even more target content and tenor. Helfat and Raubitschek (2018) adds that, by shaping trajectories of technology development, and constraining members of an ecosystem through technological lock-in, and the establishment of integrative routines may considerably increase the power of ecosystem orchestrators to reap benefits that reinforce their ability to leverage their ecosystem.

All of this amounts to an overwhelming advantage that tips off other competitors, especially when data is also included in the equation. Athey and Luca (2019), explain ecosystem orchestrators use as levarage the data that has origin within their ecosystem to develop personalized and individual offerings.

In recent years, a few competitors have established dominance in multiple categories and expanded their scope. In terms of market capitalization, the same five US corporations (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook) have significantly increased their absolute value and gained a competitive advantage, indicating a clear market perception of dominance. (autor original).

Ecosystem firms prioritize growth and depend on capital markets, which render traditional techniques as innefective. The financialization of the economy, which provides funds to ambitious enterprises and encourages managers, only worsens the matter. Ecosystem orchestrators' equity market prices indicate potential for significant growth and increased margins due to their predicted dominance.

The lack of impact on Big Tech market capitalization from EU regulation and shifting moods in the USA may be due to the growing lobbyist and academic community's support for the industry. However, China leads the regulatory surge, according to Smithurst (2021), Chinese tech giants are an example of the effect of regulation on future profits. - ISTO PODIA SER UM BOCADO MAIS DESENVOLVIDO.

Big Tech giants are not so much in competition (intercosytem competition), as they service each other the same as they compete. Each Big Tech firm tries to create its own market and ecosystem instead of competing in existing market segments (Jacobides et al., 2006).

Mana pag 5 de 30 we gotta study more…pwwweaseee

-No me gusta disto porque me parece demasiado confuso e difícil de explicar

Intraecosystem and interecosystem:

Both of these competition types are essential for innovation and consumer welfare. Within the intraecosystem competition, it is evident that in the beginning, orchestrators are collaborative with complementors; however, according to Rievtveld (2020), as their position is sedimented, they change their policies. Turning those increasingly more exploitative. This raises serious competition-abusive issues.

Thus, while final customers may be happy with the “free” product, orchestrators may intrude on them in nonmonetary ways (through advertising) and may be squeezing their complementors too (Jacobides et al., 2020: 13).

• é sobre isto que a minha tesona vai girar.

Ecosystem orchestrators strategically employ APIs, Big Data analytics, and contractual constraints to ensure interconnectivity and interoperability for end users. However, the same tools might give profitable points of control and resources to gain a strategic competitive edge or gather economically important information. For example, Facebook and Google connect complementors to their platforms and collect real-time data on user preferences and behaviors. This allows them to profile clients and offer hyper-targeted advertising services.

• Again, all of this ties into the technofeudalism theory - direct quotation from the book here! The situation may seem less catastrophic than its actual impact. Not only are these customer profiles used to render profits, but they are also used to modulate interests and consumption.

When platforms act like the middleman, several significant issues occur , the information, activity, and preferences of the user are used for hypertargeted avertising. Those platforms can harness hubs for collusive activity in their own ecosystem to establish pricing. These platforms can increase the willingness to pay for the platform by offering additional features and encouraging complementors to create goods that bring value to the platform.

If there are only a few ecosystems that are similiar in size and power, having strong competition within each ecosystem can be good for smaller companies that partner up with the bigger firms and users (???)

Relevant Market:

The relevant market scope does not hold the new market changes; this framework is narrow, failing to calculate the effects of an “undertakingś levaraging its dominance in one relevant market to related markets in the same ecosystem”. As Katz and Shapiro (1994) note, new entrants face increased costs. To survive these new firms have to create a competing corporation with the existing complementaors.

As a coubteractack, an orchestrator can make their products to be incompatible with its rivals. Another strategy, to subdue conmpetiton for dominant actors, is an exclusitivity conditions that sells complementary goods, which leads to overprice products for the final consumers.

In these cases, the orchestrator consolidates their postion and increase their market power, regulatory bodies. Thus, the competition authority “will have to define two separate relevant markets - one where undertaking is dominant and the other on which the effects of abuse are felt”. And when the extent of abuse is assessed, there is a need to establish a casual link connection between those two relevant market.

Page 8

Estamos na pag 8 yellow part - also a quote anterior é da pag 8. Next time, bring the pc porque isto está me a aleijar o pescoço, or maybe it's the fact that I was doom scrooling

We have the situation of aftermarkets, where a manufacturer impedes external firms from servicing its equipment. And bla

Back to the relevant Markets:

The concept of a relevant market comes short when applied to platforms or ecosystems where its worth depends on the users and not product quality. For instance, Google sells “cloud” to advertisers while providing access to its platform. As mentioned before, the access is not truly free; personal data is required. We can see it as a contract bundling digital services with personal data (Economides and Lianos, 2019).

It strengthens the positive feedback loop between the data inferences and the search. Google sells to its advertisers (capitalists) because of the large number of users. As a consequence, ad prices go up. However, keep in mind that search and advertising are complementary services across several relevant areas; if we focus on just one market, we will overlook the factors shaping the overall dynamics. - Again autor da cena

As an alternative, some authors (ie Newman, 2019; Evans, 2020) have presented “attention markets”, which focus on exploitative effects on different parameters that are end users' concerns (e.g., privacy).

Competition law faces difficulties moving beyond a limited focus on finished-goods pricing as an indicator of market power, which ignores much of the actual activity and considers only the relevant market framework.

Siegenfeld and Bar (Yam, 2020) contend that before it's too late, the regulatory framework must be adapted to situations in the real world.

Ecosystems impose Lock-in:

Competition is restricted by ecosystems due to compatibility lock-in, which might be a type of non-generic complementarity lock in.  As a prime example stands the decision on the landmark Kodak of 1992. The aftermarker view does not cover all lock-ins and effects that are felt in different markets, as well, other sets of users.

• Microsoft Bundle case 1990s

  Insofar as customers purchased a "bundle," the complementor/aftermarket method would likely have found nothing wrong with it. This would have allowed the market to be defined more broadly and absolved Microsoft of using lock-in power in the media player market. When the conventional tool of market definition was expanded to consider the indirect network effects resulting from the feedback loop between end users from one side of the market and developers or third-party hardware manufacturers from the other, the approach was altered by the US and EU cases.

  This made it possible for regulators to assess the impact on all sides of the platform, including hardware makers, developers in the particular sector (media players), and end users. They separated the platform's fundamental features as a "market"—in this case, the operating system used on PCs—and, after achieving supremacy at that level, concentrated on how it might be utilized by an anticompetitive behavior in the markets (i.e., "tying" the OS to other services without giving customers any option), such as media players.

  However, even this strategy is insufficient to address digital ecosystem competition. We must now modify our strategy to handle the competitive difficulties that arise in ecosystems, much as we did with the seminal examples on aftermarket/complementary goods (like Kodak) to take into account MSP, tying, and network externalities (Microsoft).

  Instead of focusing on a single core market (in this case, the OS), we should examine the nature of ecosystem dependencies and the lock-in that ecosystem orchestrators might impose on users and complementors by creating nongeneric cospecialization that limits entrance and competition. Instead of dominance in a specific market, competition issues arise from the very nature of the ecosystems (in this case, MSPs) and the capacity of a dominant operator to remain at the center of a multiproduct ecosystem.

More intricate ecosystems based on matching or transaction platforms, such as credit-card networks, where both parties participate on the platform concurrently, are difficult for the market definition technique to handle.12 As a result, various methods were used to define the market for transaction (matching) platforms in the USA and the EU.

Regulators seem not to have been able to comprehend the reach and interworkings of complex digital ecosystems, more specifically, those that are based on advertising with multi-sided platforms, like Facebook and Google. The platform uses multiproduct ecosystems to strengthen their hold on customers and gives advertisers access to customer data as a result of customer traffic that can produce a unique ability to offer a valuable asset that resulted from a nonmonetary dominance in another field (search or social media).

The platform's many factions have different goals. As a result, the owner of a social media platform who has established a multiactor and multiproduct ecosystem can dominate. With multiple products than ever before, it can impose its own ad-tech services. Customers' options may be limited since social media lock-in prevents customers from easily accessing alternative complimentary services elsewhere. Additionally, it can force complementors—like marketers or app developers—to accept abusive terms of trade in order to keep users. (The same

A dominant firm in an ecosystem may be able to unreasonably restrict access, choice, or innovation by using their relationship with the end consumer. They can also monetize the knowledge they gain aboutconsumerpreferences from consumer Internet usage, either to directly benefit their own activities (or those they broker) or by selling information about and access to the consumers through advertising; they may also get an unfair edge when entering neighboring sectors, with the use of AI's opportunities, real-time testing, and capital market funding in anticipation of these advantages.

• O homem está a falar dos tipos de business models que desencadeam ou não (tell-tale signs) se a firma irá utilizar a posição dominante para fins abusivos.

Digital ecosystems are complex. It controls opportunities that are available to consumers and complementors that could offer innovative alternatives and possibly grow and be a competitor in the market. These factors can result in barriers for future competitors to enter the market. A prime example is Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram, which impedes viable alternative platforms, innovation, and competition. Ecosystems present major concerns because their orchestrators in a dominant position have the power to limit or restrict competition, suppress innovation.

Businesses that are subject to regulation frequently claim in the regulatory debate that it might impede innovation. It may hinder their own or their partners' innovation and make some service bundles more challenging, but this is done to encourage competition and other forms of innovation that would not gain traction in the absence of regulatory action. This argument is firmly supported by the growing body of research on the potentially harmful effects of M&A on innovation and competition, including "killer acquisitions," which highlight the anti-competitive incentives behind the acquisitive behavior of dominant firms and the potential benefits of regulatory intervention to foster innovation (see Cunningham et al., 2020; Petropoulos et al., 2021).

According to the author tal tal, Competition authorities should adopt a more dynamic view of the issue, and regulatory policy in ecosystems should be more specifically focused on the advantages and disadvantages of interfering with innovation itself. Varian (2019) explains the reason for a more dynamic and proactive aproach onto the complex digital markets. A new firm can become a very strong actor in the industry overnight. And traditional tools are not able to assess the fast-paced, dynamic nature of dominance and the interconnections of digital platforms and ecosystems. Consider Apple, for example. Despite having a slightly smaller than 17% worldwide market share for smartphones, ranking second only to Samsung, it generated 42% of global smartphone sales in 2021 (See https://www.phonearena.com/news/apple-iphone-account-for-almost-half-global-smartphone-revenue-aq12021_id131821.)

Most consumers only own a smartphone, but, due to the integration with the Apple ecosystem that has a set of devices and services (iTunes, Apple Music, iPods, iPads, etc.), consumers become more dependent on Apple and vulnerable to abuse. More significantly, despite hefty costs that might harm both them and their users, even major firms—like dating apps like Tinder, for example—are forced to join the Apple ecosystem. This would make it more difficult for them to provide the ideal match: Apple has a strong hold on iPhone users, which enables them to control both end users and complementors, like Tinder and Match.com, regardless of their size (Jacobides, 2021).

Now, with market share focus on regulatory tools, it would be impossible to assert Apple as a dominant in smartphones. Therefore, to confirm dominance under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) (on abuse of a dominant position), the current framework would need to have a narrow focus (European Commission, 2021). This would miss the type of competitive dominance that a strong ecosystem orchestrator/gatekeeper enjoys. Naturally, the issue still exists, and common sense has prompted a more inventive, if uneven, reworking of the instruments that are currently in use. In other words, several countries have decided to rely on certain competition law provisions that sanction the misuse of the type of financial dependence that Apple places on its premium distributors (Autorité de la Concurrence, 2020).

While providing an ad hoc remedy, some writers contend that these remedies do not directly analyze the anticompetitive impacts at the level of the Apple ecosystem, which is something that has to be addressed directly. The traditional framework fails to offerent a a viable answer to situations of lock-in that are caused by ecosystem orchestrators of crucial importance, like Apple, that face limited competition from other ecosystems and players.

O autor fala aqui da limited interecosystem competition que é o efeito

current framework fails to offer a coherent approach to situations of lock-in that result from the power exercised by actors with a central position in an ecosystem of paramount importance, such as Apple, when they face only limited competition from very few other players/ecosystems. (page 13)

Various regulatory approaches:

Expanding the limits of the conventional competition law framework

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—Not sure se é necessário abordar esta parte bc again são mais casos para saber. Mas realmente acho mesmo que tenho que saber. Acho que isto é um enquadramento muito interessante.

In the context of competition law enforcement, the term "ecosystem" is not entirely new. The European Commission (EC) has previously acknowledged the significance of ecosystem competition in the Google Android case. Given that many third-party apps incorporate Google Play Library Services and that access to the Library is required for these apps to work correctly, the European Commission stated that a rival Android app store developer would have to "make significant investments to replicate the whole Google ecosystem" if it wanted to displace the Play Store (European Commission, 2018).