Obstáculos de la Blockchain en la investigación y detección de conductas anticompetitivas

Abstract

Blockchain is one of the greatest technological milestones of the last decades. Conceptualized in the nineties and born in 2008, blockchain is a technology that has not ceased in its development and whose potential and future projection are still as vivid as in its beginnings. Its security and transparency, together with its innovative and disruptive nature, are capable of shaking the foundations of current organizational and production models. This, added to the other characteristics and possibilities it possesses, makes of blockchain a technology with enough potential to generate a notable impact —both positive and negative— on society and, consequently, on legal science. Competition law, as the cornerstone of market protection, will undoubtedly be affected by the externalities arising from blockchain. However, this effect is ambivalent. Positive externalities such as power decentralization and the generation of market efficiencies may, on the other hand, be limited by the difficulties that blockchain poses for the application of antitrust legislation in these technological environments. Such difficulties result in obstacles to the detection and investigation of anticompetitive practices, which in turn hinder the authority of competition agencies for the imposition of sanctions and remedies. The fact that there is a sphere of reality in which the regulations cannot be effectively enforced creates an area of impunity in which the limits defined by antitrust regulations can be freely transgressed without consequences. Such a conception perverts the foundations of the system itself and implies, in practice, the lack of protection of the legal assets whose defense is sought. For that reason, this document analyzes the obstacles that blockchains pose for the detection and investigation of anticompetitive practices carried out in these environments and, consequently, for the application of antitrust legislation