Thammasat University students interested in law, business, economics, data management, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 18 January Zoom book talk on Coherence between Data Protection and Competition Law in Digital Markets.

The event, on Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 4:30pm Bangkok time, is organized by the  Faculty of Law, the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

The event announcement explains:

In digital markets, data protection and competition law affect each other in diverse and intricate ways. Their entanglement has triggered a global debate on how these two areas of law should interact to effectively address new harms and ensure that the digital economy flourishes. Coherence between Data Protection and Competition Law in Digital Markets offers a blueprint for bridging the disconnect between data protection and competition law and ensuring a coherent approach towards their enforcement in digital markets.

Specifically, this book focuses on the evolution of data protection and competition law, their underlying rationale, their key features and common objectives, and provides a series of examples to demonstrate how the same empirical phenomena in digital markets pose a common challenge to protecting personal data and promoting market competitiveness. A panoply of theoretical and empirical commonalities between these two fields of law, as this volume shows, are barely mirrored in the legal, enforcement, policy, and institutional approaches in the EU and beyond, where the silo approach continues to prevail. The ideas that Majcher puts forward for a more synergetic integration of data protection and competition law are anchored in the concept of ‘sectional coherence’. This new coherence-centred paradigm reimagines the interpretation and enforcement of data protection and competition law as mutually cognizant and reciprocal, allowing readers to explore, in an innovative way, the interface between these legal fields and identify positive interactions, instead of merely addressing inconsistencies and tensions. This book reflects on the conceptual, practical, institutional, and constitutional implications of the transition towards coherence and the relevance of its findings for other jurisdictions.

The speaker will be Assistant Professor Klaudia Majcher, who teaches at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), Austria.

The event chair will be Associate Professor Kelvin Kwok, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Law, HKU.

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of data protection and competition law.

Competition law promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies.

Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement.

It is also known as antitrust, anti-monopoly, and trade practices law.

The act of pushing for antitrust measures or attacking monopolistic companies (known as trusts) is commonly known as trust busting.

Students are invited to register at this link:

https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=91479

Assistant Professor Majcher’s book, Coherence between Data Protection and Competition Law in Digital Markets may be accessed by TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

The book’s introduction, as posted online by the publisher, notes:

Abstract

The two areas of law that prove particularly relevant in the face of current challenges posed by personal data exploitation and power consolidation are data protection and competition law. Not only do they transform the markets, but also fundamentally shape the landscape of individual rights and freedoms. Important as data protection and competition law are individually, they also display plenty of intriguing points of interface in the context of the digital economy. The fact that the regulation of data protection affects markets, and that the regulation of market power and competitive conduct has a bearing on data processing and on fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals more broadly, is beyond doubt. As this introduction explains, the objective of this book is to bring to the fore the entanglements between data protection and competition law and offer a blueprint for their future interactions.

• Entanglements between data protection and competition law in digital markets

For better or worse, societies transform over time. Naturally, change always comes along with opportunities for some and risks for others. In the current age of digital transformation, two interconnected phenomena stand out: unprecedented commercial exploitation of personal data and remarkable consolidation of private power within the hands of a few technology companies. How deeply these empirical facts affect our fundamental rights and freedoms, competitive dynamism, and even political participation and democratic processes, is becoming widely recognized. In our roles as consumers and data subjects, we strive to navigate this digital reality in ways that we believe are beneficial to us. Acting as policy-makers, enforcers, judges, and commentators, we try to make sense of the empirical shifts and offer courses of action with the hope and intention of creating market conditions where individuals’ rights and freedoms are protected, innovation can thrive, and fairness is preserved.

This book adopts a perspective of contemporary law on modern digital markets. The two areas of law that prove particularly relevant in the face of current challenges posed by personal data exploitation and power consolidation are data protection and competition law. Not only do they transform the markets, but also fundamentally shape the landscape of individual rights and freedoms. Important as data protection and competition law are individually, they also display plenty of intriguing points of interface in the context of the digital economy. The fact that the regulation of data protection affects markets, and that the regulation of market power and competitive conduct has a bearing on data processing and on fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals more broadly, is beyond doubt. The objective of this book is to bring to the fore the entanglements between data protection and competition law and offer a blueprint for their future interactions.

Over a decade ago, the active existence of data protection and competition law, their mutual influences, encounters, conflicts, and synergies ushered in a period of intense global debate about how their individual paths could be reconciled. Thus far, the debate’s perspective has centred primarily on competition law: whether and how competition law should adapt to complement data protection law’s mission to protect individuals. The first institution to weigh in with a compelling call for rethinking competition law was the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS). In the opinions published in 2014 and 2016, it advocated adopting a ‘holistic approach’ to enforcement,1 the crux of which should lie in creating positive synergies between the rules of data protection and competition law by interpreting and enforcing them in a coordinated manner, ultimately ensuring ‘privacy friendly, fundamental-rights-enhancing products and services’. Such coordination of enforcement efforts is necessary because these two legal fields are underpinned by ‘compatible and complementary’ objectives, as the EDPS claimed, for example transparency, fairness, effective choice, and absence of market foreclosure for privacy-friendly alternatives.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)