Regulation of Activities of Digital Platforms by Norms of Civil and Antitrust Legislation

The development of the platform economy raises questions about the regulation of digital platforms. The author analyzes the concept and attributes of digital platforms in order to identify key characteristics affecting a possible change in regulatory approaches. For this purpose, the economic essence of the digital platform phenomenon is defined and current approaches to definition are analyzed, and general remarks on how a digital platform can be defined are offered. Through the application of the doctrine of visibility of authority, it is concluded that there is a general informational duty for a digital platform that ensures the conclusion of transactions between two persons, which can be fixed by special rules. The analysis of the current regulation shows the optimality of combining special regulation and soft law instruments through the norms of antitrust and special legislation with the possibility of developing regulation from the information duty justified by the norms of civil law. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)