The Impulse to Condemn the Strange: Assessing Big Data in Antitrust

By Alexander Krzepicki, Joshua D. Wright & John M. Yun

In current antitrust policy debates, it is almost a foregone conclusion that digital platforms’ collection and use of “big data” is a barrier to entry. In this article, we argue that big data should properly be considered a two-stage process. The reason why this classification matters is because it allows us to link big data to concepts that antitrust is already familiar with: economies of scale, learning by doing, and research & development. By linking big data with the familiar, we hope to avoid a common tendency in antitrust to condemn the strange.