Open Markets puts out Privacy Protections Through Antitrust Enforcement Article
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 17, 2022
CONTACT: Daniel Hanley, hanley@openmarketsinstitute.org
WASHINGTON- Open Markets Institute senior legal analyst Daniel Hanley and Center for Journalism & Liberty reporter Karina Montoya write in the year-end issue of Competition Policy International’s Antitrust Chronicle about the ways antitrust enforcement can provide baseline data privacy protections for consumers, despite the lack of a comprehensive federal privacy law.
With their significant market power and access to numerous unchecked data channels, Big Tech companies like Google and Meta have the ability to block competition, entrench their dominant position, and to persistently surveil consumers’ online activities virtually without restrictions that they can use to gain an unfair advantage over competitors.
Lawmakers and advocates increasingly consider antitrust enforcement as a potent legal avenue not only as a means to challenge the business practices that Big Tech corporations have enshrined in the last decade, but also to promote fair competition by fundamentally restructuring the technology industry and facilitate consumer’s data privacy interests.
In this pivotal time for federal agencies and lawmakers looking to rein in the power of Big Tech, the authors detail the interrelationship between privacy and antitrust, and present three ways in which antitrust law can be complementary to data privacy and supplement its goals. The authors explain that antitrust enforcement can (1) create a market for privacy protections, (2) target specific unfair conduct that degrades consumer privacy such as mergers, monopolization, and deception, and (3) limit data use or its acquisition by requesting that courts to impose broad structural remedies that inhibit and deter unlawful conduct related to degrading user privacy.
Read full article below or download here.
View Competition Policy International’s December 2022 edition of the Antitrust Chronicle here.
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The Open Markets Institute is a team of journalists, researchers, lawyers, economists, and advocates working together to expose and reverse the stranglehold that corporate monopolies have on our country. Learn more at www.openmarketsinstitute.org.