Page 145 - The-5th-MCAIT2021-eProceeding

Digital Market Governance and Challenges on Competition Law
in Asia: Malaysia, India, and Indonesia

b
a*
Angayar Kanni Ramaiah , Anupam Sanghi , Ningrum Natasya Sirait c
a University Teknologi MARA, Cawangan Pulau Pinang Malaysia, Bukit Mertajam, 35000 Malaysia
b Anupam Sanghi & Associates, India
c Universitas Sumatra Utara, Medan, Indonesia
* Email: kanni844@uitm.edu.my

Abstract
The magnitude of the consumer market in East Asia in particularly India, and ASEAN nations has evolved a robust digital
revolution and competition, enhancing the efficiency of the nations digital market. This digital economy is also succumbed
with multitude of unprecedented challenges, like the killer merger, algorithmic manipulations, and abuse of dominance. So,
tension has grown on the governance and regulatory control on the usage of the technological tools and resulting impact on
the consumer welfare. Although this is indeed a global phenomenon, the Asian regulators are further challenged because
of their relatively inadequate, rather unprepared rules of the game in digital platforms, to regulate the unfathomable, digital
features like, the big data (with technologically advanced tools) management, algorithmic usage, and related artificial
intelligence (AI). These tech features have shifted beyond human sovereignty to machine efficiency (data gathering,
processing and usage) bypassing all the conventional legal podium. The developing economy like ASEAN and India are
heavily dependent on the Western technology and their Competition Law enforcement is comparatively still at infant stage
with limited resources to tackle or legitimise all the digital activity. This paper firstly highlights the lack of jurisdictional
control and challenges on Asian competition agencies, on digital mergers, algorithmic price setting mechanism and abuse
of dominance with case study in Malaysia, Indonesia, and India. Secondly, discusses enforcement mechanism adopted in
advanced jurisdiction like European Union and the United States before concluding the discussion with some
recommendations for improvement.

Keywords: competition law; digital economy; big data; algorithm and artificial intelligence

1. Introduction

Digital marketing, with smart digital computing technologies, on platform-markets via internet and the
World Wide Web (WWW) infused with various anti-competitive collusion (price-fixing or cartel), monopoly,
and Mergers and Acquisition (M&A) using Artificial Intelligence (AI), as hub and spoke network and
algorithm. The governance of this digital knowledge management and marketing is still an evolving experience
for Asian regulators, who are rather slow and often challenged to properly address its atrocities. Thus,
significant decline in ‘competition’ experienced in precipitating concentrated market or market dominance, with
the rising market power of large firms that are slowing business dynamism (Foda & Patel, 2018) and
transactional decisions of the consumers (when providing their personal data) (Ritter & Slyom, 2018).
Therefore, potential digital firm’s scale on platforms, its intangible capital, market concentration and knowledge
monopoly must be moderated to ensure level playing field for competitors, newcomers as well as consumer
welfare. Competition Law (CL) and policy that moderates market efficiency has a broad and deep role to
moderate these fast-moving digital features from adversely effecting market competition (Peter & Singh,2019).
This paper discusses the digital market challenges on Asian eco-system with respect to digital merger,

E- Proceedings of The 5th International Multi-Conference on Artificial Intelligence Technology (MCAIT 2021) [132]
Artificial Intelligence in the 4th Industrial Revolution