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Data and discrmination

Aussie CDR

The BIS Annual Review for 2019 touches on this, noting that "Another, newer type of risk is the anticompetitive use of data. Given their scale and technology, big techs have the ability to collect massive amounts of data at near zero cost. This gives rise to “digital monopolies” or “data-opolies”.

The BIS go on to warn that big techs can exploit market domination to engage in price discrimination and extract rents. An example given is that they may use their data to identify the highest prices that customers will pay for different financial services. The concern stems from that fact that price discrimination does not just have distributional effects (ie, raising big techs’ profits at customers’ expense without changing the overall amounts produced and consumed) but could also have adverse economic and welfare effects. 

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