Beyond price and money: From early insights to contemporary theorizing of non-price competition and non-monetary exchange in Internet markets

Over the past five decades, Telecommunications Policy has documented evolving debates about regulation and the public role of communications industries. As Internet platforms have risen to prominence, these debates have increasingly turned to questions of how to understand and govern their market power. Competition law and enforcement have become key tools in this effort, but their traditional focuses leave critical blind spots. This article argues that two long-marginalized dimensions require renewed and wide-reaching theoretical attention: non-price competition and non-monetary exchange. By tracing their intellectual lineage from early- and mid-twentieth-century economics and the political economy of communication to their still underdeveloped treatment in contemporary research and enforcement practice, the article shows how the strong emphasis on price and money has obscured the central role of factors such as quality, variety, privacy, and innovation, as well as the barter-like exchanges of attention, time, and data that shape “free” digital services and competition in Internet markets. Building on this diagnosis, the article proposes a prospective research agenda to more systematically account for these dimensions in the analysis and governance of digital markets and communications systems. It calls for a decisive shift from discipline-centered research to interdisciplinary, problem-centered theorizing and lays out a methodological pathway for doing so through evocative theoretical boundary-spanning. This proposal invites cross-disciplinary dialogue, offering suggestions to be taken up, challenged, and extended through scholarly debate around open questions and promising directions for theorizing, addressing, and understanding the wider societal and economic challenges raised by non-price competition and non-monetary exchange.