Blockchain Industry Observation Column · No. 60
Author丨Abhinav Chugh
Picture丨From the Internet
Blockchain technology has laid the foundation for building trust between parties, but it has yet to realize its potential. Dr. Thibault Schrepel said that both blockchain and antitrust share the common goal of seeking free economic trade. Collaboration between blockchain and antitrust requires mutual understanding and concrete action.
Blockchain technology offers great credibility and transparency without the need for trusted third parties. However, the platform nature of the blockchain, how it is priced, and its impact on the supply chain poses considerable risks to users, to the blockchain itself, or to anti-competitive behavior against the blockchain.
Policymakers and the blockchain community are now hoping that competition policy and antitrust experts will find a middle ground that avoids situations where blockchain controllers engage in anticompetitive behavior, whether by controlling prices or entering into collusive agreements to unfairly increase price. This reduces users’ trust in blockchain technology and sets them up for failure.
We discussed this emerging issue with Dr. Thibault Schrepel, associate professor of law at VU Amsterdam and faculty member at Stanford University’s CodeX Center, who has focused much of his research on the antitrust aspects of blockchain technology.
He noted, “Western legal systems have historically helped build trust between parties and reduce transaction uncertainty by providing legal procedures. Nonetheless, building trust still entails significant transaction costs, which blockchain may reduce to A smaller level. At the same time, the very nature of the technology raises fundamental questions about antitrust law and how individuals conduct transactions.
At an early stage when the technology is still being developed, proactively engaging with relevant stakeholders in the blockchain community to educate them about antitrust laws and how authorities are dealing with them could be a way forward.
Q: What drew you to work on and contribute to antitrust law, especially as it relates to blockchain?
Dr. Thibault Schrepel: Thanks to Professor Mainguy, I decided to study antitrust law when I was a student, after taking his first hour course. Then I went to the US to finish my studies and started my Ph.D. on predatory innovation in digital markets. At that time, I wrote a piece on blockchain technology and discussed the intersection between blockchain technology and antitrust in the OECD group.
From that moment on, I started looking at the interplay between the two, which I found interesting because everything was open. This prompted me to write several articles on the topic and eventually a book called Blockchain + Antitrust: The Decentralization Formula.
I started my research in this field by studying the antitrust issues brought about by blockchain technology, which is a typical legal issue. It took me a long time to realize that blockchain technology and antitrust are moving in the same direction, and more importantly, they complement each other very well. This book ensures that both work together after addressing their differences.
Q: What are the most critical challenges you face in computer-related regulations? What are the challenges associated with emerging technologies?
Dr. Thibault Schrepel: Its hard to say which one is the most critical. If youre an antitrust expert, understanding a technology is a major challenge, but one that must be overcome. Let me be clear here: Antitrust lawyers and law enforcement officers dont need to learn blockchain code or AI systems from scratch, but have a sufficient level of computer science to understand the legal implications, options, and shortcomings of their actions. The same is true for smartphones. No antitrust expert knows how to design a complete smartphone, but relevant antitrust experts will understand the impact of smartphones on competition and how to regulate their use. Only in this way can antitrust experts be able to ensure fairness in the process and cooperation between agencies.
If youre a computer scientist, your challenges are slightly different. Computer scientists are asked to work with antitrust experts to develop the right tools and effective methods, and to provide the corresponding data for these tools. Before that, they also faced incentive problems. Antitrust agencies pay employees a fraction of what big tech companies pay them, and they dont get more compensation. This means that if we want to overcome this challenge, we need to discuss monetary incentives that protect and foster relevant practices.
Antitrust agencies, policymakers, and market participants can all benefit from the new field of computational antitrust, which aims to develop computational methods for automating antitrust procedures and improving antitrust analysis. The Stanford Computer Antitrust Project was established in January 2021 to raise awareness of the field and provide concrete research and solutions. It formed an academic committee made up of more than 55 competing institutions and 35 academics.
Q: What are the most exciting new developments in global antitrust regulation?
Dr. Thibault Schrepel: Im not sure what the most exciting new developments are, but what excites me the most is the combination of technology and law, whether its increasing procedures and analysis, or achieving substantive goals. In the article Blockchain + Antitrust, I explained that both blockchain and antitrust seek a common goal, which is to make economic transactions free from coercion through means such as decentralization.
Q: What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work? What do you want people to know?
Dr. Thibault Schrepel: I hope we can move beyond the against vs. pro enforcement debate. My work tries to contribute to different law enforcement situations, hopefully my work will be more dynamic, more in line with complexity theory, and somewhat innovative. First, I see the use of computational tools, such as natural language processing, unsupervised machine learning, or agent-based modeling, as a way to bring antitrust enforcement closer to market reality. Furthermore, blockchain antitrust requires a different type of enforcement activity, meaning protecting the technology from artificial forms of centralization without challenging the core characteristics of blockchain.
Q: How can the legal system catch up and leverage advances in data science and technology to support innovation in law?
Dr. Thibault Schrepel: Legal systems are designed and run by people, so education is key. I believe that computer science innocence needs to be learned by doing, which is why I have made the relevant resources open and accessible to all. Antitrust agencies and governments need to prioritize understanding the latest developments in blockchain technology, as well as risks and opportunities, so that public systems can catch up.
Now more specifically, it is a challenge for the legal system to develop the right computational tools and to provide them appropriately. In some cases, the necessary data is already in the hands of agencies. For example, they can label past case law and train machine learning systems on that basis to detect new patterns. In some cases, however, it may be difficult to access the required information. While web scraping and the use of public documents in the hands of other government agencies may help, ultimately, we will need to give agencies greater investigative powers. The CMA has access to a weeks worth of data from Google and Bing searches, which is not possible for the European Commission. This is an important topic that should be discussed alongside procedural fairness to ensure that computer industry-related antitrust improvements serve the public interest rather than private interests.
Q: How can the antitrust and blockchain communities work together in the long run?
Dr. Thibault Schrepel: I use the third part of Blockchain + Antitrust to answer this question, but I want to briefly say: (1) Agree on the need for cooperation, (2) Solve the sticking point, which is antitrust Violations of the blockchain, or violations of its functions and objectives (3) Specific scenarios that cooperation may implement. One thing is for sure: Without a proper understanding of blockchain and antitrust, cooperation will never be achieved. Unfortunately, the confrontation between the two will ultimately conflict with the interests of the blockchain community, the antitrust community, and the broader democratic market society. This is simple game theory.
The original report comes from Abhinav Chugh, head of agency content and partnerships at the World Economic Forum. The Chinese version is compiled and organized by the Chain Market team, and the English copyright belongs to the original author. Please contact the editor for Chinese reprint.
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