TOTM
Doing double damage: The German competition authority’s Facebook decision manages to undermine both antitrust and data protection law
Truth on the Market
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The German Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office or FCO) this week reached a decision in its nearly 3-year-old Facebook investigation. The decision appears to be based not on a violation of competition rules per se, but, at root, on alleged violations of European data protection rules. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some commentators — who view the case from a purely idiosyncratic, outcome-driven perspective — are praising the agency. But the reality is that the decision is unsound from either a competition or privacy policy perspective and will only make the fraught privacy/antitrust relationship worse.