ICLE affiliate Thibault Schrepel on the German Facebook decision in Bloomberg article

Thibault Schrepel explains how the German Bundeskartellamt decision is in opposition to accepted competition law in a Bloomberg interview:

The Bundeskartellamt decision “goes to the heart of Facebook’s business model: excessive data accumulation to maximize its advertising revenue,” said Agustin Reyna of the European consumer group BEUC. “The decision will reverberate around competition authorities across the EU. Exploitative data practices are a matter of competition law even when a service” isn’t paid for.

But Thibault Schrepel, an assistant law professor at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, said the German decision “deviates from the usual standards of competition law” by not explaining why Facebook’s market power lets it collect the data or how that creates “data barriers to entry” that shut out potential rivals. The authority is claiming to protect consumers from the company’s data collection when “in fact, it seems they benefit from this.”

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