Data As An Essential Facility In Insurance And Reinsurance Markets
- IJLLR Journal
- Dec 26, 2025
- 2 min read
Aditi Choula, Indian Institute of Management, Rohtak
ABSTRACT
This article challenges the notion that the market for insurance and reinsurance is capital intensive and that competitive superiority hinges on balance sheet superiority. The assertions offered in this article that data has now become the critical infrastructure input that determines competition in the modern market for insurance and reinsurance. Historical claims data, catastrophe loss data, and long-term loss development files have become essential for proper risk pricing, underwriting authenticity, and allocation of capacity. The absence of access to these sources of information means that companies can not only expect to pay higher prices for resources but also lack the means to compete and keep up with the market.
A transition from capital dominance to data dominance is best observed in the reinsurance sector, where a few large global reinsurers and analytical companies and a few data cooperatives in the industry compile loss data across locations and scales and over time. Here, the players essentially act as data gatekeepers because the loss data compiled cannot easily be duplicated by a new competitor. The compilation of the insurance data is also strongly path dependent, where its claims and disaster experiences over a period of several decades are vital because only then do they gain significant experience and are also subjected to a non-repeatable disaster experience.
In spite of these forces at work, the area of competition law took a long time to incorporate the concept of data as market power in the insurance industry. Most conceptual frameworks that exist presently relate to price, quantity, or capacity constraints, where data is regarded as a lower-order input rather than market infrastructure. This paper submits that it is difficult for that conceptual framework to be sustainable. Data in the insurance/reinsurance business may amount to an essential facility that may exclude competition.
The article has three major contributions. First, it generalizes the essential facilities doctrine, which has classically been connected with physical infrastructure, by locating the insurance data within the underlying logic of the essential facilities doctrine. Second, the article harnesses the post-digital antitrust approach and provides a reconceptualization of data by defining data as infrastructural data instead of being merely informational data. Third, the article provides a comparative approach for access obligations and intervention on the basis of balancing competition, innovation, and stability.
In highlighting the challenges posed to existing antitrust rules by data-driven dominance within one of the economy’s most significant sectors through its focus on insurance and reinsurance data as essential market infrastructure, this paper argues that a necessary evolution of competition policy can and must ensue.
