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Why Privacy Is an Antitrust Issue

By  |  May 28, 2019

By Dina Srinivasan

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    As Facebook has generated scandal after scandal in recent years, critics have started to wonder how we might use antitrust laws to rein in the company’s power. But many of the most pressing concerns about Facebook are its privacy abuses, which unlike price gouging, price discrimination or exclusive dealing, are not immediately recognized as antitrust violations. Is there an antitrust case to be made against Facebook on privacy grounds?

    Yes, there is. In March, when Representative David N. Cicilline, Democrat of Rhode Island, called on the Federal Trade Commission
    to investigate Facebook’s potential violations of antitrust laws, he cited not only Facebook’s acquisitions (such as Instagram and WhatsApp), but also evidence that Facebook was “using its monopoly power to degrade” the quality of its service “below what a competitive marketplace would allow.”

    It is this last point, which I made in a law journal article cited by Mr. Cicilline, that promises to change how antitrust law will protect the American public in the era of Big Tech: namely, that consumers can suffer at the hands of monopolies because companies like Facebook lock in users with promises to protect their data and privacy — only to break those promises once competitors in the marketplace have been eliminated.

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