COMPARATIVE LAW EXPERIENCES: REFUSAL FROM SERVICE PROVIDERS 219 but the main focus was on explicit anticompetitive agreements between Apple and six large publishers6. In May 2017, the European Commission accepted commitments from Amazon to abandon price parity clauses. During this investigation, which had started in 2015, “the Commission considered that such clauses could make it more difficult for other e-book platforms to compete with Amazon by reducing publishers’ and competitors’ ability and incentives to develop new and innovative e-books and alternative distribution services”7. There are some aspects which distinguish digital markets from traditional ones and require particular attention8. These aspects strictly relate to the main effects of e-commerce on competition, which scholars have typically identified as follows: i) the reduction of search costs, due to the ready availability of information online; ii) the modification of distribution costs, linked to the changes in the relationship between supplier and consumer and to the proliferation of intermediation and disintermediation; iii) the expansion of the geographic range of transactions; and iv) the emergence of new forms of asymmetric information peculiar to e-commerce. Moreover, online platforms, as typical examples of two-sided or multi-sided markets, require particular attention, since most economic studies have been typically devoted to single- -sided firms and, therefore, their application to multi-sided markets requires adequate adjustment in order to avoid misleading results. On 21 June 2017, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled that Expedia will have to pay a penalty of 1 million euros for imposing price parity clauses on hotels in France in breach of the country’s commercial code. The clauses restricted hotels from offering lower prices than those found on booking sites. Previously, in August 2015, France passed the “Macron Law” which prohibited the use of all parity clauses. Intermediation activity in digital markets has been the subject of wide- -ranging literature up to now, mainly in the field of economics. Conversely, little work has been done by the legal scholarship on the competition law implications of this phenomenon, and it has been developed only very recently as a consequence of some problematic cases involving platforms. As a matter of fact, a recent case law attests that one of the key concerns of competition authorities 6 See the European Commission’s decisions in Case COMP/39847/E-Books (2012, 2013) and United States v. Apple Inc., 952 F. Supp. 2d 638, 15 647 (S.D.N.Y. 2013). 7 European Commission Press Release, 4 May 2017. 8 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Competition Issues in Electronic Commerce (2000); P. Buccirossi, ‘Background note’, in OECD, Vertical Restraints for On-line Sales (2013).
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