Data and market definition of Internet-based businesses

Market definition is the first step of competition analysis. In practice, relevant markets are mostly defined for the end products and services and it is also the same for current cases concerning Internet-based businesses (IBBs). Data has important influence on the competition of IBBs. However, instead of selling data directly, the IBBs usually use data to produce, improve and innovate products and services. Under such circumstances, there may be no relevant market defined for such data following the conventional market definition methods. This article’s investigation shows that online data play different roles in the competition of IBBs and the conventional competition analysis methods only miss some aspects but not all of them. Alternative approaches including the input market definition and the putative online data market definition proposition fail to solve the problem. What might be of help is to switch focus to improving the relevant market definition methods for products and services which online data are related to and pay more attention to the inner relationship between online data and the Internet-based products and services when identifying which market to define.