Speaker Series - Vigilante Justice: Driving Competition with Scale
- Date
- September 19, 2022
- Time
- 12:00 PM EDT - 1:00 PM EDT
- Location
- POD455 - A pizza lunch will be provided
- Open To
- Lincoln Alexander School of Law Community
Across Europe and North America, governments are struggling to keep “Big Tech” in check. The European Commission recently passed the Digital Markets Act, the US Federal Trade Commission and some states are suing Big Tech for anticompetitive practices and Canada’s Competition Bureau is investigating Google’s dominance. Dr. Ope Akanbi aims to broaden our focus to consider business tactics that have been deployed in response to emerging monopolies. In this talk, she addresses two such examples of what she describes as market vigilantism—using market dominance to force other companies into alignment with an idealized vision of how businesses should operate. In particular, Dr. Akanbi focuses on how such idealism compares with legal principles of antitrust law. The first case focuses on Apple’s entry into the ebook market while the second focuses on the company’s governance of privacy in its App Store.
Speaker
Dr. Ope Akanbi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is cross appointed to the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture offered in partnership with York University. Her research areas are privacy, media regulation, labor and technology and the political economy of digital media.
Dr. Akanbi was the 2018-2019 Jefferson Scholars Foundation National Fellow in Technology and Democracy. She is qualified to practice in the State of New York and in Nigeria. She currently serves on the Board of the Labor Tech Research Network and the Canadian Advisory Board of the International Association of Privacy Professionals.
Dr. Akanbi's publications include articles in Media Culture and Society, the International Journal of Communication and Yale Law Journal Forum.
This event is part of of the Lincoln Alexander Law Speaker 2022/23. For more information, visit the series page.