| | MAY 20228RELEVANCE OF COMPETITION LAW IN ALGORITHM DRIVEN DIGITAL MARKET By Vijayalakshmi Natarajan, Senior Director, Legal ­ India & Asia Pacific Region, HarmanVANTAGE POINTV ijayalakshmi Natarajan, Senior Director, Legal ­ In-dia & Asia Pacific Region, Harman (Samsung) based in Bangalore, India. She is a member of the board of the director. She leads the legal function for the APAC re-gion, enables business expansion and growth in compli-ance with legal & regulatory framework across countries. Previously she worked with companies like Microsoft, and Fidelity. She specializes in mergers & acquisition, corpo-rate and commercial laws, intellectual property rights, technology law, cyber security and data protection. She actively participates in policy advocacy programs specifi-cally on completion law, data protection, privacy and cyber security.Adam Smith introduced the theory of 'invisible hand' meaning, "free market economy left to their own devices will produce results more beneficial than can be realized by intervening in the markets".Globally, the key focus of competition law and policy is to encourage and sustain fair, free competition by regulating the process of competition and prohibiting anti-competitive behavior, such as abuse of dominant position, cartels, price fixing, collusion, unfair trade practices etc. Competition policy strives to achieve 'level-playing field' and aims to remove 'entry barriers' for all players, which will help markets to be competitive. Fair and effective competition in turn will promote economic growth and development, greater innovation, operational efficiency, better quality of products and services at lower prices and overall consumer welfare. As such, competition is a central driver for productivity and growth in the economy.In the last few decades, rightly termed as fourth industrial revolution, technology has and still keeps evolving at an incredible speed and continues to disrupt conventional markets and competitive practices. The exponential growth of digital landscape - online marketplace platforms, e-Commerce companies and search engines are taking the competition online from conventional brick and mortar industries. While, the competition landscape is shifting to a more dynamic and complex digital environment, which is controlled by algorithms, the following questions arise­ 1. Does technology encourage competition or facilitate monopoly?2. Are the existing competition law and policies, still hold good and relevant in regulating digital markets? 3. How effective are the regulations where the competition is driven not by humans but by bots?Vijayalakshmi Natarajan, Senior Director
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