The Government Enters the Data-Sharing Game
The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) recently announced a proposed settlement with RealPage Inc. that would strictly prohibit the company from using competitors’ nonpublic data in its rental-pricing software. Curiously, that remedy is nearly the precise opposite of the September order from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in a suit the DOJ brought charging Google with illegal monopolization of general search services. In that case, the court required Google to share portions of its search index and user-interaction data with qualified competitors.
The diverging resolutions in these two cases no doubt reflect different alleged competitive harms requiring different responses. Still, both interventions raise questions about whether courts and regulators can successfully engineer competitive outcomes through behavioral mandates, and whether market forces might have resolved these problems with less risk of unintended consequences.