This paper presents the study commissioned by the Catalan Antitrust Tribunal carried out by a group of experts looking into the effects of competition on the information and communication technologies. The framework studied is the digital economy from a global perspective, an economy that differs in many ways from the traditional economy, both in terms of the complexity of the relations between the agents involved and the appearance of new relations, situations and concepts, such as lock-in or information cartels. One of the differentiating traits of this new global market with local jurisdiction is the possibility of achieving perfect competition. However, due to the network being scale-free, the market ends up being dominated by a very small group of companies.

The study takes six different ambits into consideration: identification of people, relations between people (with the appearance of the consumer to consumer market), relations between people and companies, relations between people and computer companies, relations between people and telecommunications operators, and, finally, relations between companies, where data exchange and rethinking of software patents are required. Finally, the conclusion was reached that it is impossible to talk about competition in the digital economy on a local basis and that strategies have to be designed to resolve future problems, for which it would be useful to create an observatory in order to detect possible points of conflict.