The European Commission’s understanding of the term ‘ecosystem’: lessons for future enforcement under the revised Notice on the Definition of the Relevant Market

Abstract The article examines how the term ‘ecosystem’ has been used in the Commission’s antitrust, merger, and Digital Markets Act decisions. We analyse 313 uses of the term ‘ecosystem’ and identify two approaches to defining ecosystems that are present in the Commission’s decisions: technological, which focuses on a core service or product, and organizational, which focuses on the company. Next, we identify the characteristics of ecosystems that are emphasized by the Commission, the most frequently cited being the lock-in effect, the enumeration of entities involved in the creation of the ecosystem, the benefits of ecosystems, and switching costs. Next, the variety of the identified meanings and characteristics of the term ‘ecosystem’ is reconciled with the Commission’s revised Notice on the definition of the relevant market. We propose guiding principles on how the Commission’s experience with the use of the ‘ecosystem’ category could be more systematically incorporated into European Union competition law by introducing the category of access markets: markets that serve as gateways to the ecosystem and allow the orchestrators to exercise their technological power by unilaterally deciding who may offer products within the ecosystem and under what conditions.