Liyang Hou – författare

On 20 December 2017 and 10 April 2018 respectively, the Court of Justice of the European Union passed two landmark cases on the legal status of internet platform Uber. The Court established that Uber does not merely provide an app, but rather offers a full transport service. Without Uber there would be no market for non-professional drivers using their own vehicles. Moreover, the platform exercises a decisive influence over the conditions under which drivers provide their service. These rulings address the very core of several highly debated questions on the legal status of online intermediaries such as Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit. Is regulatory intervention needed to reap the potential benefits of the platform economy or to mitigate the potentially negative consequences of regulatory disruption? Can platforms be held liable for the proper execution of services provided by others? Does existing national regulation impose disproportionate market restrictions on innovators? Should we rethink labour protection aand social security to address the potential loss of social protection of non-standard workers? How can revenue law be improved to tackle elaborate (international) schemes to avoid direct and indirect taxation? Emerging platforms claim to create new market opportunities and to provide innovative solutions to improve social welfare. Conversely, the platform economy blurs established lines between traditional legal categories, such as business and consumer, personal and professional, and worker and contractor. Traditional regulation, which often focuses on balancing the interests of two contracting parties, is now confronted with the three-sided contractual relationship between a platform, a supplier and a user. In this book, a panel of international legal experts unravel the legal status of online intermediaries a thorny knot that legislators, judges and lawyers across the globe are facing.

This book brings satisfying definition and clarity to this field at last. Exploring the substantive differences between competition law and sector-specific regulation after the methodological integration, it presents the first detailed analysis of the many hundreds of notifications and Commission letters generated under the Article 7 procedure, identifying the most relevant cases dealing with market definition, market power, and remedies. It compares these decisions with relevant competition law cases and highlights elements with a bearing on sector-specific regulation. It also offers hugely valuable guidance through the vast amount of documents in the Commission’s CIRCA database. Topics and issues raised include the following: definition of product markets; delineation of geographic markets (including sub-national); different practices in relation to assessing single market power and collective market power; and competition problems such as refusal to deal, margin squeeze, non-price discrimination, and excessive pricing. There can be little doubt that this is the new reference point for researchers and practitioners in this domain. By systematically categorizing the concepts and legal criteria and building a solid theoretical framework on the intersection of competition law and sector-specific regulation, the author has created a resource that is sure to be welcomed by all those involved in regulation of electronic communications markets and network industries in general: academic scholars, telecommunications regulators at the EU and Member State levels, competition authorities, law firms specializing in IT/communications law, practitioners in IT and telecommunications companies, and consultants in the sector. The book will also prove very useful for scholars and practitioners in other parts of the world interested in comparing the EU system with their own.