THE COMPETITION COUNCIL AND ITS PARTNERS WILL IMPLEMENT A PROJECT ON DIGITAL MARKETS

The Competition Council, together with the Polish and Latvian competition authorities and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), will implement the European Union (EU) technical assistance project "Competition Market Study: Digital Sector – Poland, Latvia and Lithuania" to help ensure competitiveness in the digital markets of the three countries.

To mark the launch of the project, a kick-off event was held in Vilnius, where representatives of the OECD, the European Commission (EC) and the competition authorities implementing the project presented the objectives of the project and the activities to be carried out and discussed opportunities for further cooperation.

Welcoming the participants, Jolanta Ivanauskienė, the Chairperson of the Competition Council, emphasised that digital markets are one of the sectoral priorities of the Lithuanian Authority, and therefore, a lot of efforts are made to ensure that competition law requirements are complied with in digital markets. She mentioned not only the several investigations carried out, but also the monitoring of online marketplaces last year together with Latvian colleagues, and the e-Commerce Guidelines for the Lithuanian companies that were developed as a result, in order to provide market participants with a broader explanation on how to comply with the requirements of the competition law.

"We are glad that we are not alone on this journey. A coordinated approach in our neighbouring countries –   Lithuania, Latvia and Poland – is particularly valuable in promoting effective competition and can provide important insights that will lead to more coherent and effective business regulation. We believe that the OECD project will provide a better understanding of the national markets in the three countries, and at the end of the project, we will have research-based recommendations reflecting the unique challenges and opportunities in each market," said Ms Ivanauskienė.

She also stressed the importance of the technical support provided by the EC and the involvement of the OECD in the project and invited all market players to actively provide their insights, which will give a complete and accurate picture of digital markets in the countries.

As part of the project, the OECD, with the support of national authorities, will carry out a market study of online marketplaces and their ecosystems in Lithuania, Latvia and Poland and identify the main market players and their activities, as well as address potential competition problems and make recommendations on how to resolve them, considering national and European legislation. Training and seminars will be organised to strengthen the capacities of the institutions concerned.

The project is expected to help define rules to keep digital markets open and competitive. At EU level, the Digital Markets Act, which applies to the world's largest online platform operators, sets fair operating rules and helps to ensure competition, but does not apply to smaller entities with market power limited to a particular region or country. In the absence of specific regulation, the effectiveness of competition enforcement might be undermined because the investigations carried out by competition authorities in digital markets require very detailed market knowledge, significant resources and take a long time.

The estimated duration of the project is 21 months.