Gatekeepers’ Tollbooths for Market Access: How to Safeguard Unbiased Intermediation

Gatekeepers may seek to maximize revenues by replacing any unbiased, purely relevance-based intermediation of business users with a biased, payment-based intermediation. To this end, search engines, app stores or online marketplaces may exploit an entrenched intermediation power by making the outcome of their matching increasingly dependent on the amount of money that a business user is paying the platform for the intermediation, rather than on objective criteria to determine the relevance of of