[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] Digital Privacy is Making Antitrust. Interesting Again

Wed Jun 7 18:41:05 UTC 2017

The article is so vague, there's something in it for everyone.  The overall
thrust is definitely about unilateral behavior abusing a dominant market
position.

I'm not sure what gave the author the idea that the panelists were talking
about mergers weakening privacy protections.  The article goes on to
discuss the EU's fining of Facebook for making misleading statements to the
EU Competition authorities during their review of the WhatsApp acquisition
(FB said they wouldn't mingle FB user data and WA user data, but they did;
however the concern seems to have been that the combined data store might
have given FB too much market power, but FB said it was told that this was
not material to their review.  In a separate matter, the EU is apparently
considering whether FB's changes to WA's privacy policy in 2016 raise any
legal concerns.)

Here's a quote from an earlier interview with Mundt from the
Bundeskartellamt website, touching on the same subject.  I haven't been
able to find any transcripts or more detailed reports of Mundt's speech at
the Oxford Conference.  From what little I can find, it appears Mundt was
talking about unilateral behavior resulting in antitrust violations, rather
than merger antitrust analysis or horizontal (oligopoly/cartel) behavior.
This dovetails with Paul Keating's point -- Mundt is talking about abuse of
a dominant position (so these particular concerns would be limited to the
dominant industry players). As you can see below, Mundt has voiced concerns
that " the use of illegal terms and conditions may constitute an abuse, in
particular, if the acceptance of these illegal terms follows from the
dominant position."  As such, he seems to be taking a broad view of what
constitutes "antitrust harm".

*The Antitrust Source: *The Federal Cartel Office recently announced that
it’s initiating an antitrust investigation, a competition law investigation
of Facebook, for its data collection practices. And the investigation
suggests that your agency believes that antitrust competition law may have
a role to play in protecting the privacy of consumers. I just want to make
sure I understand that correctly. What is the connection that you see
between competition law and consumer protection law in this regard?

*Andreas Mundt:* It’s a pending case and therefore we can just share some
initial thoughts on it. We look at whether Facebook has abused its possibly
dominant position in the market for social networks with its specific terms
of service on the use of user data. We have indications that Facebook’s
conditions of use violate German data protection rules. Of course, not
every law infringement by a dominant company is also relevant under
competition law. But we have a ruling by the Federal Court of Justice that
there can be a link between the violation of the law on general terms and
conditions and the assessment of exploitative abuse in the case of a
dominant company. According to this decision, the use of illegal terms and
conditions may constitute an abuse, in particular, if the acceptance of
these illegal terms follows from the dominant position. So what we have to
do in this case is to take a very close look at whether there is a link
between a data protection infringement on the one hand and the abuse of
market power of a dominant firm on the other. We are at a very early stage.
For the time being we will investigate the relevant product market to see
if Facebook is dominant here or not, and then we will look at the possible
link between the possible dominance and the violation of data protection
rules. By the way, it’s an administrative proceeding so there are no fines
at stake, of course. And this is a case where we will cooperate very
closely with the European Commission, which we already did before we
initiated the proceeding. We will work closely with the national
competition agencies in Europe and of course with the data protection
agencies in Germany, and maybe in other countries.

http://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Interviews/EN/the%20antitrust%20source%20-%20Interview_with_Andreas_Mundt.html

Here is a link to an article on the Oxford conference panel (unfortunately,
no quotes or transcript):
https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-05-26-online-markets-and-offline-welfare-effects-internet-competition-society-and

Greg

On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 6:01 AM, Paul Keating <paul at law.es> wrote:

> They would have to show economic damage flowing from an excess of market
> control.   Not likely unless you are the size of google.
>
> Sincerely,
> Paul Keating, Esq.
>
> On Jun 6, 2017, at 11:36 AM, Volker Greimann <vgreimann at key-systems.net>
> wrote:
>
> I am not sure you read the same article I did, but to me it suggested the
> exact opposite (emphasis added):
>
> "Mundt’s words may have sounded mundane, but his implication was anything
> but: the world’s foremost antitrust regulators were publicly discussing *
> whether they should intervene if a transaction weakens consumer privacy
> protections*, a pervasive concern in the era of big data."
>
> Best,
>
> Volker
>
> Am 05.06.2017 um 16:49 schrieb jonathan matkowsky:
>
> Interesting read. Thanks for sharing. This article would be a reason to
> keep Whois publicly available without restriction. The kind of private data
> mining analysis discussed in the article is pretty much irrelevant though
> to the issues we are dealing with.
>
> Jonathan Matkowsky
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 5, 2017 at 5:35 PM, Carlton Samuels <carlton.samuels at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>
>> ..its a competition issue, says the head of the German antitrust agency.
>>
>> https://www.wired.com/2017/06/ntitrust-watchdogs-eye-big-tec
>> hs-monopoly-data/
>>
>> -Carlton
>>
>>
>> ==============================
>> *Carlton A Samuels*
>>
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