In the comments to this post, Peter Swire (Ohio State) points to some recent comments (see also here and  here) he submitted to the Federal Trade Commission on how to incorporate privacy into conventional antitrust analysis.  The privacy and antitrust link appears to be something that will receive quite a bit of attention in the coming months and years.  The basic argument in favor of incorporating privacy into antitrust analysis under appropriate circumstances is not too controversial…

Read the full piece here. 

Randy Picker (HT: Randy) has posted an interesting new paper to SSRN entitled “Competition and Privacy in Web 2.0 and the Cloud“.   It is an insightful look at the how privacy rules imposed on Web intermediaries might raise competition concerns.  Consider, for example, the relationship between privacy rules and vertical integration that Picker highlights as a potential unintended consequence of privacy rules…

Read the full piece here. 

Via the WSJblog, I see that Google and the government are tangling again over the government’s effort to obtain search records (this time relating to porn-viewing-by-children enforcement efforts) (I guess that should read anti-porn-viewing-by-children enforcement efforts). It reminds me of a post of Dan’s on Concurring Opinions from a while back that I wanted to comment on, but, well, I didn’t have a blog then. I do now.

Read the full piece here.