As shown in many theoretical and empirical contributions, data-driven markets, where innovation costs decrease with accumulated user information, tip toward durable monopoly even absent predatory conduct. Now CPI Antitrust Chronicle, a journal read by policy makers and competition law practitioners, has published a special issue on data-driven markets, bringing this topic, which is frontier in many competition law cases involving big tech firms to its audience.

“From Tipping to Trustees: Why Data-driven markets Require Institutional Design, not Optimization” (joint with Paul de Bijl from Dutch competition authority ACM), is our contribution to the volume.

There we hold that the EU’s Digital Markets Act correctly mandates data sharing by gatekeepers but excludes evolving dominant firms and limits obligations to designated platforms. Voluntary alternatives, such as industry-led data spaces, fail structurally: data-rich incumbents earn monopoly rents from data hoarding and face zero incentive to share genuine insights. This article argues that restoring competition requires institutional design, not quantitative optimization. Drawing on economic governance theory, we show that mandatory data sharing demands three institutional features: regulatory adjudication by national competition authorities to determine sharing obligations, enforcement via public data-pooling infrastructure, and judicial review to prevent overreach. Institutions grounded in regulatory legitimacy and coercive enforcement, rather than multi-sided platform pricing mechanisms, are necessary to implement a feasible solution to enforce compliance and restore innovation incentives on data-driven markets.