EU: Google sides with Facebook amid Data-Dominance investigation

Google sided with Facebook Inc. amid a brewing antitrust clash over how the social network giant may have abused its power to leverage customer data.

Fabien Curto Millet, an economist at Google, told a Paris conference that it’s wrong to meld data privacy with antitrust issues. Earlier, the head of France’s competition authority said he preferred a less confrontational approach than his German counterparts had taken on the issue.

“We shouldn’t mix things up” and should instead reinforce specific regulators rather than putting competition officials in charge, Millet said. “The protection of data privacy is part of the good results produced by good competition,” but “it wouldn’t be logical to elevate that to a different status.”

Germany’s Federal Cartel Office said earlier this month that it’s examining whether Facebook abused its possible market dominance by forcing customers to agree to terms allowing the use of their data. The German probe adds to a growing list of antitrust threats to US Internet giants in the EU — from Alphabet Inc.’s Google to Amazon.com Inc. Up to now, Menlo Park, California-based Facebook has mainly tussled with privacy watchdogs in the bloc in a clash over its revamped policy for handling personal photos and data.

Full content: Bloomberg

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