A Critical Discussion on Privacy Concerns in EU Antitrust Enforcement

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-271-2_33How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Antitrust; Privacy; Data; Consumer Welfare

Abstract

The topic of antitrust and privacy has been widespread for many years. It deals with the integration of privacy in competition law. In this topic, the German Facebook case is a hot-debated case. In this case, the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) explicitly takes privacy into antitrust concerns, promoting the topic to a wider discussion. Opinions diverge greatly in FCO’s approach. As a result, there is a need to determine whether the EU antitrust enforcement should take privacy into account. In this essay, I analyse first the conflicting views about privacy concerns in antitrust. Then, I argue that privacy should be an EU antitrust concern from three perspectives. Firstly, privacy harm can lead to consumer welfare degradation. To solve the degradation, the intervention of competition law is necessary. Secondly, with the users’ privacy data collection, the dominant companies have the incentive to implement price discrimination to exploit consumer surplus. Thirdly, the data protection law alone is unable to address the antitrust privacy issue because the data protection law and competition law are interactive in the digital economy.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinpeng Liu
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/07/29
TI  - A Critical Discussion on Privacy Concerns in EU Antitrust Enforcement
BT  - Proceedings of the 2024 5th International Conference on Mental Health, Education and Human Development (MHEHD 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 275
EP  - 280
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-271-2_33
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-271-2_33
ID  - Liu2024
ER  -