In recent years, the competition law community has become absorbed in discussions around the dominance of the largest digital platform companies: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. Such discussions, for example about the meaning of power in the digital age, have helped to shift the field beyond its narrow focus on price and output effects. Yet, a crucial dimension is missing from the vast majority of commentary on competition law and the digital economy: the role of financialisation. Financialisation—understood as the hypertrophy and increased volatility of the financial sector, together with the reorientation of corporate governance around the principle of shareholder value maximisation—has important implications for the competitive strategies of the Big Tech companies, as well as who benefits from their economic power. Presenting quantitative findings on the corporate governance regimes of the Big Tech platforms, and drawing on insights from corporate law and heterodox economics, this chapter represents an attempt to integrate a financial capitalism perspective into the competition law analysis of digital markets.

This paper delves into the ways in which EU competition law affects the right of workers to organize and combine with each other and act, collectively, in the furtherance of their rights and interests at work, in particular by means of collective agreements concluded with one or more employers. It begins by opposing the limited ‘labour exemption’ contained in the recent competition caselaw and contrasts that with a more traditional ‘labour law’ approach, that would typically see collective bargaining as a fundamental, and universal, labour rights to be enjoyed by all workers, or in the alternative will have to integrate the asymmetry of bargaining power between labour and digital monopsonies. We put forward a more nuanced and balanced approach, by reference to the concept of ‘predominantly personal work’, that could act as the new watershed concept around which labour rights and competition law could define their respective fields of operation and which may already inspire the recent Commission’s proposals enabling self-employed without employees (“solo self-employed”) to access the right to bargain collectively on a number of issues with digital platforms.

This Chapter introduces the theme of the book, presents the value chain approach that is followed, and explores the challenges of regulating competition in a changing environment regarding food value chains from a technological, economic and ecological perspectives.

Chapter 12 introduces a new economic framework to analyse power in the food value chain. Spurred on by the increased interest of policy makers and antitrust authorities over the last decade, academic scholarship has made progress in analysing the origins and consequences of different dimensions of power across the value chain: buyer power, bargaining power, economic dependence. This Chapter summarises the key concepts used to analyse and measure power in the food value chain and explores the different theories of harm that have been developed and occasionally tested in recent cases. Far from representing just a ‘mirror image’ of the exercise of seller power, the analysis of buyer power may at times require a different set of analytical tools and a more detailed, case-by-case understanding of its specific origins and effects. From then on, the authors move to suggesting a broader theoretical framework that would encompass all different dimensions of power in the value chain, under the rubric of vertical power. After defining the theoretical contours of the concept, the authors offer some metrics that enable an empirical verification of the existence and exercise of vertical power.

Chapter 6 examines the rise of concentration in the food value chain, first as a side-effect of the technological transformation of agricultural production, and second as a result of the various merger waves that have occurred during the last three decades. It provides a concise analysis of the degree of concentration in various segments of the food value chain, noting that the trend has been an important increase of concentration. The authors nevertheless note that the causal link between the rise of concentration and price effects remains unclear, and that competition authorities have relied instead in more elaborate theories of harm, than simple structuralism. However, firms’ strategies in the food value chain change and as farmers get locked in larger agri-tech ecosystems, competition authorities become increasingly aware that focusing on price effects in specific product markets may not be the only dimension they should focus on. The food industry is also important from a social perspective, and public authorities increasingly take into account broader public policy concerns, such as the struggle against climate change, the protection of biodiversity and systemic crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. This complex context calls for a public policy response which breaks with the more traditional approaches of acting only within the boundaries of the different policy fields.

Chapter 18 provides a human rights’ narrative in envisioning the implementation of competition law in the food value chain. The authors argue that competition law, with its inherent focus on market regulation and providing a level playing field to market players, offers a credible conceptual and institutional response for addressing this challenge along transparent, predictable and sustainable lines. They argue that not only does the implementation of the right to food stand to benefit from a market-centred approach but also that competition itself becomes a more “holistic” and meaningful tool for social reform by taking into account values inherent in the progress towards the global right to food by integrating the multi-dimensional reality of the global food supply and retail chain in the assessment of specific commercial practices and/or sectors. The Chapter provides the “grammar” of a more holistic competition policy in this crucial sector for national and global economies and attempts to dissect the actual and potential impact of the right to food rhetoric on competition law enforcement.