CEPR Competition Policy Event 17 June 2021
15:00-18:00 BST / 16:00-19:00 CEST / 10:00-13:00 EDT
Privacy/data protection and antitrust enforcers continue to operate in silos: data protection agencies (supposedly) enforcing data protection rules, and antitrust agencies doing "market power" and traditional anticompetitive conduct. Yet market power allows violations of privacy and data protection, and those in turn entrench market power. Privacy experts deserve a place at the antitrust table to inform the analysis of mergers and conduct, to lessen consumer exploitation and discipline market power. We have long needed "integration", not just "intersection". Is it starting to happen? The State AG complaints in the US against Facebook and Google are concerned with privacy degradation as monopoly rents, and discriminatory privacy changes as anticompetitive conduct. There are calls for federal privacy regulation. In Europe, we have had the GDPR since 2018 but enforcement is lagging. Germany has been a pioneer with Facebook and new cases with a data focus being opened under the new competition law regime. France too. In the UK the competition and data protection agencies - CMA and ICO - just issued a joint statement setting out a "holistic" approach. This is unprecedented.
The newly launched CEPR Competition Policy RPN organized a discussion between senior antitrust regulators, privacy experts, and economists. In the first panel, privacy and data protection experts discussed some key insights for antitrust enforcers. The second panel discussed with antitrust leaders how these ideas are progressing in practice.
Part 1: What are the Privacy Experts Seeing that the Antitrust Regulators are not?
15:00-16:20 BST / 16:00-17:20 CEST / 10:00-11:20 EDT
- Johnny Ryan (Senior Fellow, Irish Council for Civil Liberties)
- Dina Srinivasan (Thurman Arnold Project, Yale University)
- Jason Kint (CEO, Digital Content Next)
- Simeon Thornton (Director, UK Competition and Markets Authority)
- Alessandro Acquisti (Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University)
Part 2: What's the Progress on Integrating Antitrust & Privacy?
16:30-18:00 BST / 17:30-19:00 CEST / 11:30-13:00 EDT
- Andrea Coscelli CBE (Chief Executive, UK Competition and Markets Authority)
- Elizabeth Denham CBE (UK Information Commissioner; Global Privacy Assembly Chair)
- Andreas Mundt (President, German Cartel Office)
- Rebecca Slaughter (Commissioner, US Federal Trade Commission)
- Wojciech Wiewiórowski (European Data Protection Supervisor)
- Chris d'Angelo (Chief Deputy Attorney General, Office of the New York Attorney General)
- Henri Piffaut (Vice President, French Competition Authority)
