Coherence between Data Protection and Competition Law in Digital Markets

Abstract

Abstract In digital markets, data protection and competition affect each other in diverse and intricate ways. Their entanglement has triggered a global debate on how data protection and competition law should interact to effectively address new harms and ensure that the digital economy flourishes. This book offers a blueprint for a more coherent approach towards these two areas of law for the benefit of society and the economy. By way of introduction, this book provides a comparative overview of EU data protection and competition law, focusing on their evolution, their underlying rationale, and their key features and concepts. Their touch points are explored by looking at their common objectives. In addition, a series of examples demonstrate how the same empirical phenomena in digital markets pose a common challenge for protecting personal data and promoting market competitiveness. A panoply of theoretical and empirical commonalities between these two fields of law, as this book shows, are barely mirrored in the legal, enforcement, policy, and institutional approaches in the EU and beyond, where the silo approach continues to prevail. Conceptually, the ideas that this book offers for a more synergetic path forward are anchored in the concept of ‘sectional coherence’. This new coherence-centred paradigm aspires to render the interpretation and enforcement of data protection and competition law mutually cognizant and reinforcing. The book also includes a reflection on the conceptual, practical, institutional, and constitutional implications of the transition towards coherence, and the relevance of its findings for other jurisdictions.