Regulators Eye Privacy As New Antitrust Battleground

When Andreas Mundt, president of Germany’s antitrust agency, said he was “deeply convinced privacy is a competition issue,” he spoke to the fear of many major tech companies: that regulators would intervene if transactions are seen as weakening consumer privacy protections. An intellectual shift among antitrust experts could pose a threat to Silicon Valley firms, which provide free services and profit off vast troves of information gathered about consumers. “The world’s most valuable resource is now data,” WIRED reports in this lengthy article on the issue, “and Silicon Valley has cornered the market on amassing personal information.” – “When more and more services are ‘free,’ you can see how that really renders antitrust feeble,” Lina Khan, a fellow with the Open Markets program at New America, told WIRED. Maurice Stucke, law professor and former trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division, agreed: “Data is the new lingua franca. That is the currency, and [tech platforms] can translate that data into dollars.”