Platform oligopolies, anti-trust policy and sustainable development

This paper reviews debates on monopoly and competition in economics and management theory, to inform contemporary anti-trust/competition policy. It claims that extant antitrust policy is not designed to address today's realities of platform-based global oligopolies and that a new approach is required that accounts for their specificities and fosters world-wide sustainable development. This requires addressing constraints to sustainability and innovation-fostering fair, workable and healthy competition and co-opetition, diversity, and pluralism, intra and inter-nationally. Peoples, policymakers, and international organisations should help co-create the conditions that thwart regulatory capture and review available options to foster competition. These include eliminating conflicts of interest embedded within the business model of platform oligopolies, internalising negative externalities from their operations, determining the full real prices charged for services, discouraging anti-competitive acquisitions, fostering new firm creation and growth and breaking monopolies when required, in a way that does not undermine the innovation and value creating aspects of their activities.