Privacy Blog Assignment – Pannel 6
By: Ricardo Leite Ribeiro
The article which I am providing the link here was published in the Wall Street Journal on March 2, 2016. It’s about the fact that the German antitrust regulator, the “Bundeskartellamt”, had opened an investigation against Facebook for the “abuse of dominant position” regarding the harvest of personal data from consumers. In the words of the head of the agency “It needs to be clarified whether consumers are being sufficiently informed about the nature and scale of data collection”.
The news is relevant because it points out the possibility of competition laws to be enforced as a vehicle to guarantee privacy protections for consumers. This is a path that Europe may follow, especially regarding abuse of dominant position violations. Might be antitrust a new frontier for advancing in privacy protection? Is there a role for it to play in this field? Are its instruments and tools suitable for the task? What would be the remedies applied in this case?
From the article, it becomes clear that the accusation the motivate the investigation is that Facebook is leveraging its monopolistic advantage as a social network to obtain advantages in the data market. As an antitrust problem, this might be classified as using the market power acquired in one specific market to restrain the competition in an upstream market. This is particularly interesting because in U.S. this conduct is very unlikely to be a violation of § 2 of the Sherman Act, particularly after Trinko.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-faces-antitrust-investigation-in-germany-1456920796