Suchergebnisse

Competition authorities can identify a violation of the data protection rules when such a finding is necessary to establish an abuse of dominance under the competition rules. This is the main outcome of the judgment that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered in Meta Platforms on 4 July 2023. The judgment is the next step in the saga that started with the 2019 competition decision of the Bundeskartellamt (the German Federal Cartel Office) requiring Facebook (now Meta) to refrain from combining user data from different sources beyond its social network. The judgment provides a welcome confirmation that data protection standards can also matter for the interpretation of the competition rules. However, what is more remarkable and less expected is the general framework the CJEU sets out for coordination between competition and data protection authorities building on the duty of sincere cooperation and the clarity with which it evaluates the different legal bases Meta invoked for processing user data. The judgment can become a reference point for assessing the legality of personal data processing by powerful firms, but also leaves competition and data protection authorities with an assignment to explore how to coordinate their work in the future.

Data-driven technologies provide businesses with ever stronger abilities to engage in behavioural manipulation, steer consumer preferences, and exploit individual vulnerabilities. The article argues that competition law needs to give more prominence to consumer sovereignty and consumers' freedom of choice in response to the rise in personalized forms of consumer exploitation by dominant firms, whose harm goes beyond the scope of the remedies offered by data protection and consumer law. Analysing the scope to establish exploitative abuses under Article 102 TFEU, the article discusses how personalization challenges current competition concepts, and submits that competition analysis needs to be adapted at the stage of assessing abuse to address competitive harm from personalization. The article proposes recognizing "personalized exploitation" as abuse of dominance by incorporating dynamic consumer vulnerabilities into the competition analysis and by assessing anticompetitive effects against a "personalized welfare standard" of those exploited instead of against the overall consumer welfare.

Abstract
Differentiated treatment is a key focus in current competition investigations of the European Commission and national competition authorities, ranging from more prominent placement of one's own services in a ranking to preferential access to data and the favouring of businesses that pay higher levels of commission. Based on their exclusionary and/or exploitative character, the paper distinguishes three types of differentiated treatment on online platforms in order to provide an analytical framework for assessing the extent to which such practices are abusive under Article 102 TFEU, namely: pure self-preferencing, pure secondary line differentiation and hybrid differentiation. The paper points out that the main area where EU competition law currently does not offer effective protection is in the most far-reaching situation where a business is blocked from a platform without legitimate justification. To address harm in such cases, the paper suggests giving a stronger role to economic dependence both within and outside EU competition law and explores possible measures building upon the Platform-to-Business (P2B) Regulation as well as the notion of fairness of platform-to-business relations.

EU Competition Law, Data Protection and Online Platforms. Data as Essential Facility' provides a highly topical study of how EU competition law interacts with data on online platforms. All agree that the digital economy contributes to a dynamic evolution of markets and competition. Nonetheless, concerns are increasingly raised about the market dominance of a few key players. Since these companies hold the power to drive rivals out of business, regulators have begun to seek scope for competition enforcement in cases where companies claim that withholding data is needed to satisfy customers and cut costs. This book is the first to focus on how competition law enforcement tools can be applied to refusals of dominant firms to give access to data on online platforms, such as search engines, social networks, and e-commerce platforms? commonly referred to as the?gatekeepers? of the Internet --Back cover