Privacy & Antitrust: "Integration", not just "Intersection"
CEPR Competition Policy Event 17 June 2021
15:00-18:00 BST / 16:00-19:00 CEST / 10:00-13:00 EDT
Privacy/data protection and antitrust enforcers continue to operate in silos: data protection agencies (supposedly) enforcing data protection rules, and antitrust agencies doing "market power" and traditional anticompetitive conduct. Yet market power allows violations of privacy and data protection, and those in turn entrench market power. Privacy experts deserve a place at the antitrust table to inform the analysis of mergers and conduct, to lessen consumer exploitation and discipline market power. We have long needed "integration", not just "intersection".
Is it starting to happen? The State AG complaints in the US against Facebook and Google are concerned with privacy degradation as monopoly rents, and discriminatory privacy changes as anticompetitive conduct. There are calls for federal privacy regulation. In Europe, we have had the GDPR since 2018 but enforcement is lagging. Germany has been a pioneer with Facebook and new cases with a data focus being opened under the new competition law regime. France too. In the UK the competition and data protection agencies - CMA and ICO - just issued a joint statement setting out a "holistic" approach. This is unprecedented.
The newly launched CEPR Competition Policy RPN (https://cepr.org/content/cepr-rpn-competition-policy) organized a discussion between senior antitrust regulators, privacy experts, and economists. In the first panel, privacy and data protection experts discussed some key insights for antitrust enforcers. The second panel discussed with antitrust leaders how these ideas are progressing in practice.
Download the Speaker biographies
Watch the recordings below:
Part 1: What are the Privacy Experts Seeing that the Antitrust Regulators are not?
This session laid out the data harms that arise from degraded privacy and data protection and how this maps into harm to consumers using the language of competition economics.
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Johnny Ryan |
Simeon Thornton |
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Dina Srinivasan |
Alessandro Acquisti |
|
Jason Kint |
Moderated by:
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Gregory Crawford |
Cristina Caffarra |
Part 2: What's the Progress on Integrating Antitrust & Privacy?
In this session, senior regulators joined the roundtable. Speakers gave their view on progress achieved and areas for improvement.
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Andrea Coscelli CBE |
Rebecca Slaughter |
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Elizabeth Denham CBE |
Wojciech Wiewiórowski |
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Andreas Mundt |
Chris D'Angelo |
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Henri Piffaut |
Moderated by:
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Cristina Caffarra |
Johnny Ryan |