P.C. Abirami, Assistant Professor, VIT School of Law
Introduction
“Antitrust law exists to maintain competitive markets, prevent market failures, and protect consumers”1.However, application of antitrust law to emerging, layered technologies remain debated. Overextension of antitrust law to emerging, integrated products can stymie novelty decreasing consumer welfare. By the same token, refusing to outspread antitrust. As high technology cases progressively challenge economic perceptions of how markets function and antitrust litigation becomes more time-intensive and expensive, antitrust law faces a pragmatic crisis2. Does antitrust have a role to play in emerging high technology markets? Exactly how should antitrust law, and specifically doctrines like tying and bundling, be applied in high technology industries?3 Moreover, even if there is a role for antitrust to play, are high technology markets so inherently dynamic or functionally secluded that they simply do not raise the kinds of competitive concerns addressed in traditional antitrust investigations? These issues cannot be resolved through abstract discussion alone. Abstract discussion of antitrust principles does little to advance the understanding of the limitations and potential of antitrust doctrines that depend entirely on the characteristics of the market and the behaviours involved. Likewise, current precedent provides little insight into the outer boundaries of tying and bundling doctrines. Instead, this Note considers the hypothetical application of tying and bundling doctrines to an emerging high technology industry smartphone as a means of drawing out the challenges, limitations and foreseeable extensions in the future of antitrust law
