Trademark protection is essential to consumer trust – that determines the success of platform entrepreneurship
Sonia K Katyal & Leah Chan Grinvald, 2018 - *Chancellor's Professor of Law; Co-Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, University of California, Berkeley AND **Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law, Suffolk University Law School. “PLATFORM LAW AND THE BRAND ENTERPRISE” BERKELEY TECHNOLOGY LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 32:1135, https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/facpub/article/2394/&path_info=Platform_Law_and_the_Brand_Enterprise.pdf //DH
In the platform enterprise, trademarks function just like other trademarks in the sense that they serve informational and economic functions.44 By enabling consumers to trust that their experience of a certain product can be consistently associated with a particular trademark, trademarks lower consumer search costs. 45 Yet trademarks play an even more central role in platform entrepreneurship because they enable consumers to identify clusters of marks with a particular platform, thereby facilitating the reduction of transaction costs that are essential to a platform's success. For example, with the Parking Panda platform, both sets of marks, the Parking Panda's and the parking companies', inform consumers that their parking experience will be similar to their previous experiences, thereby enabling purchasers to rely on their previous decisions.