Antitrust Chronicle^® – Privacy & Competition

Dear Readers,

As consumers worldwide increasingly entrust online platforms with their sensitive user data, regulation (both in terms of specific privacy or data protection rules, and antitrust rules) have scrambled to keep pace. Data has famously been called the “oil” of the new economy. Just like oil, raw data is not valuable in and of itself. Rather, its value is created when it is collated quickly, completely, and accurately, and connected to other, similarly relevant data. How such data is used and shared between companies is therefore key to its value, and this raises obvious privacy (and competition) problems.

As a result, the so-called “data economy,” which is the basis for many digital products and services, has been recently facing pressure from a number of regulations worldwide that aim to protect user privacy.

Individual companies, too, have adopted policies that claim to protect user privacy on their platforms. Reinhold Kesler opens with a discussion of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (“ATT”) rules as a representative example of such a policy. Following a brief description of ATT, the author reviews the current state of research and investigations by competition authorities to provide insights on the possible effects of the privacy change.

Building on this, D. Daniel Sokol & Feng Zhu further expound on Apple’s ATT policy. In a prior piece, the same authors claimed that this policy in fact masked anti-competitive conduct that woul