Are Privacy and Antitrust on a Collision Course?

Harmful dominance, democratic privacy controls, interop and illegitimate greatness.

In “The New Antitrust/Data Privacy Law Interface,” Temple Law’s Erika M Douglas presents a fascinating look at the tensions between privacy and competition.

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-new-antitrustdata-privacy-law-interface

It’s only fitting that Douglas published her paper in the Yale Law Journal, as that’s the same journal that kickstarted the modern antitrust revolution when it published Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” while she was a law student.

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

Douglas rightly points out that there are many ways in which competition and privacy are in tension with one another (and sometimes, they’re in out-and-out conflict).

Take the fight over Google’s war on third-party cookie-tracking. Google is a vertically integrated monopolist that dominates browsing, search, ads, tracking, and (to a lesser extent) display ads.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea

Google has taken (and proposed) aggressive steps that would prevent third parties from tracking…