Data is Power: on the fundamental connections between data protection law and competition law as applied to the digital market

Tech giants such as Google, Meta and Amazon control an enormous portion of consumers’ daily lives. We have grown to rely on their search engines, video sharing, social media platforms, and shopping services. Part of the reason why these digital services have become so successful is because they collect vast amounts of personal data from their users. On the one hand, analyzing a user’s previous Google searches, videos watched, or products purchased, can be helpful to predict the most relevant search results. On the other, doing so also carries serious privacy and competition risks. Many consumers do not know what data is being collected, for what purpose, and how they are being profiled by these powerful companies. At the same time, the collection and analysis of all this data also strengthens the companies’ competitive position on the market. More data leads to better predictions, more relevant advertising, and more income. It can also lead to attracting more customers, who bring in even more data to analyze. This phenomenon is even more pronounced in “data ecosystem” companies. A big tech company which operates a search engine, video-sharing platform, and internet browser, can combine the data collected through each of these branches. In essence, this dissertation explains how the collection of personal data contributes to such ecosystems’ market power, and how their market power in turn undermines the privacy and data protection rights of their consumers. It offers a number of suggestions on how competition law and data protection law should respond.