Fairness, Power and Regulation in the Digital Economy

By Johan Axhamn[*]Editor-in-Chief of NIR. Associate Professor in Business Law, Lund University.

Digital Markets, Artificial Intelligence and the Return of Fairness

The contributions collected in this special issue of the Nordic Intellectual Property Law Review (NIR) originate from presentations delivered at the conference Making Digital Markets Work for People: Fairness, Efficiency and Consumer Welfare in Dialogue, held at Lund University in February 2025. The conference brought together scholars from law, economics, philosophy and related disciplines to engage with a question that has returned to the centre of legal and policy debate with particular intensity in recent years: what role should “fairness” play in the governance of digital and AI‑driven markets?

The renewed prominence of fairness is not merely a matter of changing political preferences or rhetorical fashion. Rather, it reflects deeper structural transformations in market organisation and regulatory thought. Digital markets have developed into highly concentrated and vertically integrated ecosystems, characterised by strong network effects, economies of scope, data accumulation, and platform intermediation. A small number of large technology firms increasingly function as de facto gatekeepers, shaping access to markets, information flows, and the conditions of participation for business users and consumers alike. At the same time, the diffusion of artificial intelligence – particularly large‑scale, data‑intensive and generative systems – has amplified existing asymmetries while creating new forms of opacity, dependency, and normatively salient power.