Around this year’s American Bar Association (ABA) Spring Antitrust Meeting, the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) convened a series of high-level meetings with global competition authorities to advance a shared agenda: ensuring that competition policy supports, rather than stifles, the small and medium-sized innovators driving the global digital economy. Over the course of the week, we sat down with Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), the Malaysia Competition Commission (MyCC), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Competition Commission, the Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK), and the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC).
Convening these leading regulators from around the world in a single week reflects ACT’s longstanding leadership in international competition policy and our unique role as the voice of startups, scaleups, and independent developers in these debates. Across every meeting, we heard a common interest in understanding how competition rules affect startups and small developers. These innovative companies all depend on trusted pathways they can use to reach customers, scale across borders, and compete. As policymakers increasingly consider changes to their competition policies and enforcement practices, we discussed ACT’s perspective on what works and what does not, as well as opportunities for ongoing partnership and collaboration.
Our discussions zeroed in on the competition issues most consequential for small business innovators today. On digital platforms, we emphasized the importance of evidence-based, proportionate frameworks that preserve the integrated platform features — trust, security, privacy, and curation — that small developers rely on to reach and succeed in global markets, and we cautioned against ex ante regimes that risk reducing competition rather than enhancing it. On AI and cloud, we discussed how concentration in foundational inputs and compute can shape downstream opportunities for startups and scaleups, and the importance of competition authorities engaging carefully and deliberately when they consider fast-moving technology markets. We also explored areas where competition regulators’ action is needed based on well-demonstrated harms and abusive behavior by dominant players, such as in the case of standard-essential patent licensing.
We are grateful to the policymakers and regulators at CADE, MyCC, COMESA, the CAK, and the KFTC for their thoughtful exchanges and their openness to continued dialogue. The challenges and opportunities facing small business innovators are global in nature, and ACT looks forward to deepening each of these relationships moving forward and to continuing to bring the small business voice to competition authorities around the world.