Towards Data Portability and Interoperability Under Brazilian Competition Law: Crafting Appropriate Legal Standards for Abuse of Dominance

A crucial area of complementarity between competition and data protection law regimes is ensuring greater data mobility through data portability, interoperability, and open data standards in digital markets. The paper discusses how antitrust agencies would evaluate dominant platforms’ strategies to prevent data interoperability as an abuse of dominance violation. It delves into this topic against the backdrop of Brazilian experiences. It argues that the critical choices to be made by antitrust authorities in these cases blur the limits of the intervention over the design of digital products. Some guidance on how to set the legal standards for these behaviors is provided to help with this challenge.

By Victor Oliveira Fernandes^[1]

I. Introduction

The interaction between data protection and antitrust laws has become a vital topic for competition law scholars in recent years, as several agencies’ reports have raised major concerns about reduced levels of data protection derived from market concentration.^[2] Although antitrust and data protection regimes pursues different goals, which might even clash at their margins,^[3] in some circumstances, both branches of law require convergence.^[4]

A crucial area of complementarity between both regimes is ensuring greater mobility of data through data portability, interoperability, and open data standards in digital markets.^[5] The creation of barriers to interoperability or data portability might at the same time co