Digital platforms play a crucial role in facilitating trade, global transactions, and personal interactions. This key position has also allowed them to amass significant power, turning them into gatekeepers that can impose terms they would not be able to impose if they were constrained by competition. Strong network effects and switching costs makes their hegemony virtually unchallengeable.

This conference explores the crucial issue of how to curb the harmful conduct of digital platforms while at the same time allowing them to provide the essential services we have come to depend on. Legislators and competition enforcers may have been slow to act at first, but now platforms are facing antitrust challenges all over the world: the US government recently sued Google and Amazon for illegal monopolization; Google has seen record-breaking fines in the EU, where platform regulation has recently come into force; China has been relentlessly cracking down on the anticompetitive activities of Big Tech; Hong Kong recently took action against food delivery apps requiring restaurants to operate exclusively on their platforms. The conference will cover these and other pressing issues.

The Law Society of Hong Kong has awarded this conference up to 10.5 Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points:

Visit the conference website for more details and register here by 5pm, 17 April 2024 to attend the conference.