In the second of two articles (part I here), Stavros Makris and Filip Lubinski discuss how governments can reimagine competition policy to protect democracy and citizen welfare without abandoning traditional consumer welfare goals like innovation.
In part I, we explored how competition policy has failed to protect democracy. Building on Daniel Innerarity’s Theory of Complex Democracy, this article begins by sketching five pathways for integrating democratic imperatives into competition analysis. Competition law can begin to address the democracy‑relevant risks posed by Big Tech and counter the drift toward technofeudalism, by: (i) adopting multi‑scalar analysis that treats firms as adaptive agents within interconnected ecosystems; (ii) developing ecosystem‑centric enforcement to reflect the systemic influence of digital platforms; (iii) targeting the private regulatory power of dominant ecosystems; (iv) embracing citizen‑oriented welfare metrics that account for civic autonomy and equitable participation; and (v) embedding democratic values such as pluralism, diversity, and market resilience into competition assessments.
First, competition authorities could adopt a genuinely multi‑scalar perspective, treating firms as adaptive agents embedded in interdependent micro‑ (firms, platforms, ecosystems), meso‑ (industries), and macro‑ (sociopolitical) environments. This vantage point recognizes that corporate conduct both shapes and is shaped by legal and political institutions, so that enforcement must address cross-level feedback loops rather than treating market effects in isolation. Algorithms when employed by powerful platforms can, for instance, influence electoral processes, while corporate lobbying can skew legislative priorities, which in turn reshapes market structures and the distribution of value along supply chains. To address these dynamics, competition authorities could deploy tools such as “systemic-risk assessments” and “algorithmic audits” to examine the spillover effects of ecosystemic power and market concentration. For example, authorities might condition approval of mergers involving social media platforms on recurring audits of recommendation algorithms for political or civic‑process risks, analogous to periodic stress tests in financial regulation.
Using such tools in democratically sensitive contexts is crucial as it would help authorities evaluate how market dominance and restraints of trade could erode civic autonomy or undermine media plurality (see also here). Furthermore, within a systemic‑risk assessment framework, repeated non‑compliance by powerful firms with horizontal regimes such as the AI Act or the GDPR could be treated as a potential indicator of anticompetitive strategies that also endanger democratic values, thereby justifying intensified scrutiny under competition law.
Second, competition law could widen its lens to address the systemic risks created by digital ecosystems, understood as tightly coupled constellations of services that secure power across multiple markets through data control, infrastructural leverage, and cross‑market dependencies. Instead of defining relevant markets separately as “smartphone operating systems” and “app distribution,” this would allow authorities to treat, for instance, the integrated iOS/App Store configuration—where Apple controls both layers—as a single ecosystem and to analyze ecosystem‑level strategies (such as envelopment and entrenchment) that enable the exclusion or exploitation of business users and end users, and to design remedies at that level. Traditional competition law analysis, built around static and siloed market definitions, is poorly equipped to capture the cross‑sectoral dominance of platforms like Amazon (spanning e‑commerce, cloud services, and logistics) or Google (across search, advertising, and mapping), and has tended to rely on narrow cease‑and‑desist orders rather than structural or behavioural remedies tailored to ecosystem power.
The analysis of Ioannis Lianos and Bruno Carballa-Smichowski could be particularly helpful in that regard. These authors have built a multidimensional theory of economic power that can both (a) systematize proliferating notions like “gatekeeper,” “strategic market status,” or “intermediation power” and (b) anchor them in measurable concepts usable in dominance assessment. They argue that “power” in competition law should be understood in light of modular ecosystems, complementarity, and supermodularity, emphasizing positional and vertical asymmetries rather than rivalry within a relevant market. They also link newer labels (gatekeeper, strategic market status, conglomerate power, intermediation power) to underlying economic relations of complementarity, architectural control, and dependency, rather than treating them as ad hoc triggers. Against this backdrop, Lianos and Carballa-Smichowksi argue that panopticon power —power arising from pervasive monitoring, data collection, and informational asymmetries in digital ecosystems—can enable a firm to observe, predict, and shape the behavior of others in the system. Such power is a form of “vertical” or positional power linked to the platform’s role as an information gatekeeper within a modular architecture, rather than the simple ability to control price or output in one market.
Lianos and Carballa-Smichowski also highlight that ecosystems may have power based on differential dependency between value co-creators (asymmetric dependency). For instance, if the removal of one firm destroys more of the ecosystem’s value than the removal of others, that actor enjoys a higher degree of vertical, resource‑based power (often formalized through notions akin to centrality in value chains). Both panopticon power and power based on differential dependency can be used to operationalize relative/bargaining power and “economic dependence” within competition law while still constraining administrative discretion through quantifiable indicators.
In a similar line, Konstantinos Stylianou and Carballa-Smichowski show that digital ecosystems “interlock” value propositions, such that services in one segment systematically reinforce dominance in another, making the ecosystem rather than the single market the relevant unit of analysis. Apple’s iOS ecosystem, for instance, tightly integrates devices, apps, and payment systems in a way that raises switching costs and erects barriers to entry that cut across conventional market boundaries. Work by Manu Batra, Paul de Bijl, and Timo Klein likewise underlines how platforms such as Google and Amazon can evolve from ostensibly neutral intermediaries into active shapers of consumer choice by steering users through search rankings, default settings, and voice‑assistant environments. Framing cases through this ecosystem lens can equip competition authorities to detect and tackle strategies of ecosystem entrenchment and envelopment more effectively, and, in doing so, to better safeguard economic democracy.
Third, competition law could focus not only on market dominance but also on the private regulatory power exercised by dominant digital ecosystems. Big Tech threatens democratic values by privatizing regulatory authority, setting and enforcing rules that structure participation in key communicative and economic spaces. For instance, Meta’s content moderation rules operate as a de facto constitutional framework for public discourse on its platforms, while Apple’s App Store policies function as a private rulebook determining which apps may reach users, under what conditions, and on what economic terms. A democracy‑sensitive enforcement agenda would be prepared to challenge and reconfigure centralized control structures, such as proprietary APIs, default settings, ranking systems, or exclusive pre‑installation agreements, that entrench unilateral rule‑making power over core digital infrastructures. Rather than treating markets as private fiefdoms governed solely by platform owners, this approach would seek to restore them as public‑facing domains in which basic conditions of access, fairness, and participation cannot be dictated by a single firm. In practice, this could mean embedding structured deliberation with a wide range of stakeholders—affected communities, smaller rivals, workers, and civil‑society organizations—into remedial design, so that those most impacted by a platform’s rules can meaningfully influence how they are reshaped.
Such an orientation would also have concrete implications for remedies. Competition authorities might, for instance, require dominant platforms to submit their core governance instruments (such as content moderation rules or critical app-store policies) to ongoing multi-stakeholder review, with transparency and appeal mechanisms that limit arbitrary or self-serving changes. They could additionally mandate interoperable and non-discriminatory APIs, enabling users and third parties to layer their own moderation tools, curation systems, or app-distribution channels on top of the platform’s infrastructure, thereby diffusing regulatory power and aligning competition enforcement with democratic values.
Fourth, to move beyond the limitations of NCP and engage with democracy‑relevant risks, competition authorities could supplement the narrow consumer‑welfare benchmark with a consumer‑citizen welfare standard rather than simply abandoning quantitative analysis. Such a standard would assess how practices or transactions affect both consumer surplus and the status of individuals as citizens, including their capacity for informed participation and collective organisation. Under a consumer‑citizen welfare standard, authorities would still consider traditional indicators (prices, quality, innovation), but would explicitly incorporate effects on: autonomy (e.g. manipulation, lock‑in, dependency on a single gatekeeper), associational capacity (e.g. ability of workers or small and medium-sized enterprises to coordinate, bargain, or exit), public discourse (e.g. concentration of gatekeeping power over information flows). This standard will not replace quantitative tools (HHI, diversion ratios, innovation proxies), but adds a layer of analysis about how market structure and conduct affect people in their dual role as consumers and citizens.
To address concerns about accountability, free-floating political decisions, and decision-making by unelected authorities, it is important to translate the consumer-citizen standard into structured indicators. For example, “freedom from domination” can be approximated through measurable proxies such as dependency ratios (share of turnover routed through a single platform; critical reliance of media or app developers on one gatekeeper), switching and multihoming costs (contractual restrictions, technical lock‑ins, data‑portability barriers), unilateral rule‑setting power (extent of non‑negotiable terms, frequency and opacity of rule changes, sanctions for non‑compliance). “Market diversity and resilience” can be operationalised via diversity and redundancy (number and viability of alternative trading/communication channels, presence of credible outside options), contestability indicators (entry barriers, data advantages, ecosystem envelopment, history of successful entry/expansion), systemic‑risk style diagnostics (single points of failure for critical services, correlated exposure of many actors to one platform’s decisions). These are not more subjective than, say, defining innovation markets or predicting dynamic efficiencies; they simply make explicit dimensions that are currently treated as background or left to sectoral regulators.
This shift could be operationalized through procedural and substantive adjustments. Procedurally, the European Union’s existing Article 9 commitment procedure already allows third-party input: authorities could systematically evaluate whether proposed remedies serve economic democracy and citizens’ democratic interests, not just consumer welfare. Substantively, decisions and guidelines can start to treat autonomy, association, and public‑discourse effects as relevant competitive parameters—especially in ecosystem and gatekeeper cases rather than as externalities. In that regard, authorities would be asking not only “Are prices lower?” but also “What does this practice do to autonomy, association, and the quality of public discourse?”
A consumer‑citizen welfare standard could help competition authorities differentiate between situations in which consumer and citizen interests converge (for example, where greater choice, reduced manipulation, and lower switching costs enhance both consumer surplus and citizen autonomy) and those in which they diverge (for instance, hyper‑personalized “free” services that depend on pervasive tracking and profiling). In doing so, authorities would be encouraged to identify and openly articulate the relevant trade‑offs, rather than tacitly prioritising short‑term price and convenience gains over longer‑term democratic interests.
Such a standard could also underpin a structured decision framework. Where a practice or merger materially affects control over key infrastructures for speech or organisation, deepens systemic dependence on a single firm, or adversely impacts the capacity of workers, SMEs, or communities to engage in collective action, it would trigger a citizen‑impact assessment evaluating its effects on autonomy, association, the quality of public discourse, and systemic dependence alongside traditional consumer‑welfare metrics. By contrast, in cases where these democracy‑relevant thresholds are not met, authorities could rely on the conventional consumer welfare standard, focusing on actual or potential effects on price, output, quality, innovation, and choice.
Fifth, competition authorities could move toward democracy‑integrated enforcement by explicitly embedding core democratic values, such as freedom from domination, media pluralism, market diversity, and systemic resilience into their analytical frameworks. These values are foundational for sustaining the kind of large-scale societal dialogue that complex democracy requires.
One route is to treat democracy‑relevant metrics as standard elements of merger and conduct assessment rather than exceptional considerations. For instance, authorities could systematically examine how mergers and acquisitions affect media diversity and communicative power. A recent decision which conditionally cleared DPG Media’s acquisition of RTL Nederland only after imposing content‑diversity obligations to safeguard media plurality illustrates how conditions that protect pluralism can be built directly into merger remedies rather than being relegated to media‑specific regulation. With the benefit of hindsight we could say that this could be a much more promising approach to Meta acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram. Nowadays it would not be controversial to say that these paradigmatic examples reshaped the structure of public discourse, not just advertising markets.
A democracy‑integrated approach would generalize this logic beyond the media sector. Ongoing scrutiny of large platforms under the Digital Markets Act and emerging AI rules already points toward concerns with “opinion power,” gatekeeping over attention, and the design of choice architectures that steer users toward particular services. Competition authorities could incorporate such concerns more systematically by asking, in gatekeeper and ecosystem cases, whether a practice entrenches single‑firm control over information flows or critical interfaces, and by calibrating remedies, such as interoperability, data access, or self‑preferencing bans, to support digital plurality and institutional resilience. Existing cases like Google Shopping, Google Android, or Android Auto also provide templates for how market pluralism, diversity, and resilience can be prioritised over narrow, short‑term gains in convenience. In these decisions, authorities recognized that self‑preferencing and foreclosure in one layer of an ecosystem can erode the visibility and viability of rivals across adjacent layers, with downstream consequences for diversity of services, business models, and information sources. Making such reasoning explicit in terms of pluralism and resilience would both clarify the normative stakes and justify more structural interventions when necessary.
Under this vision, competition law becomes an institutional lever for sustaining economic democracy and democratic infrastructures (media systems, discovery tools, communication platforms, and transaction environments) rather than merely a technocratic instrument for correcting discrete market failures. It invites authorities to view markets as constitutive parts of the democratic order, where the distribution of economic and informational power conditions citizens’ ability to speak, associate, and contest, and to design enforcement strategies and remedies accordingly.
No simplism in a complex world
The digital era demands an inclusive, critical debate about how fields such as competition law are monitored, scrutinized, and recalibrated. As economic and institutional complexity intensifies, methodological approaches must move beyond simplism and single‑metric thinking, embracing multi‑scalar analysis, ecosystem‑level inquiry, and attention to technofeudal risks that better reflect the deeply interconnected nature of digital markets.
Democracy, by its nature, is repeatedly confronted with defining moments that require foundational choices about how power is organized and constrained. In these pivotal junctures, it is crucial that those affected can participate meaningfully in decision‑making, rather than being reduced to passive users of infrastructures designed by a handful of private actors. That ideal of economic democracy is fundamentally compromised when the most powerful firms unilaterally set and enforce the rules of the digital spaces in which contemporary political discourse, and much of economic and social life, now unfold, while other stakeholders have virtually no “voice” and only highly constrained possibilities of “exit”. Effective enforcement that recognizes citizens’ agency and explicitly upholds democratic values is therefore essential to address these imbalances.
The evolving relationship between technological change and democracy will hinge on the interplay between legitimate political decision‑making and the modes of communication that both shape and are shaped by digitalization. A competition law sensitive to democracy must acknowledge this interplay, resist reductive one‑dimensional metrics, and confront the normative stakes of market recalibration instead of displacing them into ostensibly neutral technicalities related to consumer welfare. However, such a “democratic turn” raises a difficult but unavoidable institutional question: expanding competition law to address democratic harms risks creating a new form of technocracy, in which unelected experts make value‑laden choices in the name of protecting democracy. The challenge is not to eliminate such choices, but to subject them to transparent standards, participatory procedures, and robust judicial and parliamentary oversight, so that democracy‑protecting enforcement itself remains democratically accountable.
There are already signs that enforcement practice is beginning to evolve in this direction. Gatekeeper designations and interoperability obligations under the DMA, experiments with interim measures and structural remedies in digital cases, and emerging coordination with AI and platform-governance regimes all suggest a gradual shift toward complexity-aware, ecosystem-sensitive intervention. The real question, looking ahead, is not whether competition law will engage with democratic harms, but whether it will do so systematically and legitimately, or through ad hoc improvisation guided by opaque intuitions about risk. The framework sketched here argues for the former: for competition authorities that treat markets as part of the democratic infrastructure, and that accept responsibility for ensuring that the economic architectures of the digital age remain compatible with, rather than corrosive of, complex democracy.
The text is based on Stavros Makris, Filip Lubinski, “Antitrust and complex democracy: Reclaiming markets from technofeudalism,” July 2025, Concurrences N° 7-2025, Art. N° 126683.
Authors’ Note: The authors would like to thank Afroditi Karatagli for her excellent research assistance and helpful comments on this essay.
Author Disclosure: The authors report no conflicts of interest. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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