<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Since decentralized organizations such as blockchain are not recognized as legal persons, questions arise regarding the ability to detect anti-competitive practices and their perpetrators. Under certain circumstances, if a competitor is unreasonably refused in access to technology, it may well be interpreted as creating an obstacle to his/her entry into the market, which may constitute a violation of the legislation of a country on the protection of economic competition. The exchange of information between players of the same market can present antitrust risks if it helps to fix prices for their products/services or to establish other forms of coordination between such players. The purpose of this study is to provide a description of current EU anticompetitive practices in the field of blockchain-technologies application, as well as to identify challenges in the EU antitrust law related to the emergence of blockchain. This article highlights the challenges blockchain poses for analyzing unilateral anti-competitive practices. This study suggests that EU competition law has a lack of operational and measurement tools to map competitive interactions taking place outside the relevant market, which could lead to rather short-sighted competition law enforcement focusing only on horizontal competition restrictions on relevant markets. The relevance of the topic is associated with the fact that the increased popularity of the use of blockchain technology requires an answer to the question of its legal nature and inclusion in the legal field in order to balance the interests of all parties to economic and legal relations.</p></abstract>

Since decentralized organizations such as blockchain are not recognized as legal persons, questions arise regarding the ability to detect anti-competitive practices and their perpetrators. Under certain circumstances, if a competitor is unreasonably refused in access to technology, it may well be interpreted as creating an obstacle to his/her entry into the market, which may constitute a violation of the legislation of a country on the protection of economic competition. The exchange of information between players of the same market can present antitrust risks if it helps to fix prices for their products/services or to establish other forms of coordination between such players. The purpose of this study is to provide a description of current EU anticompetitive practices in the field of blockchain-technologies application, as well as to identify challenges in the EU antitrust law related to the emergence of blockchain. This article highlights the challenges blockchain poses for analyzing unilateral anti-competitive practices. This study suggests that EU competition law has a lack of operational and measurement tools to map competitive interactions taking place outside the relevant market, which could lead to rather short-sighted competition law enforcement focusing only on horizontal competition restrictions on relevant markets. The relevance of the topic is associated with the fact that the increased popularity of the use of blockchain technology requires an answer to the question of its legal nature and inclusion in the legal field in order to balance the interests of all parties to economic and legal relations.

Potential Legal Challenges for Blockchain Technology in Competition Law

Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation

Department of Legal Regulation of Economic Activities

Baltic Journal of Law & Politics

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

{"article-title":"Potential Legal Challenges for Blockchain Technology in Competition Law"}

Since decentralized organizations such as blockchain are not recognized as legal persons, questions arise regarding the ability to detect anti-competitive...

Potential Legal Challenges for Blockchain Technology in Competition Law

Published Online: Oct 23, 2020

Page range: 81 - 107

Received: Mar 05, 2020

Accepted: Jul 16, 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/bjlp-2020-0004

Keywords
Abuse of dominance, antitrust, cryptology, distributed ledger, exclusionary abuse, exploitative abuse, network protocol

© 2020 Christophe S. Hutchinson et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Potential Legal Challenges for Blockchain Technology in Competition Law

Published Online: Oct 23, 2020

Page range: 81 - 107

Received: Mar 05, 2020

Accepted: Jul 16, 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/bjlp-2020-0004

KeywordsAbuse of dominance, antitrust, cryptology, distributed ledger, exclusionary abuse, exploitative abuse, network protocol

© 2020 Christophe S. Hutchinson et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
Abuse of dominance, antitrust, cryptology, distributed ledger, exclusionary abuse, exploitative abuse, network protocol