By Gilad Edelman, Wired
Here’s something to puzzle over. In December, the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of states filed antitrust lawsuits against Facebook, alleging that as the company grew more dominant and faced less competition, it reneged on its promises to protect user privacy. In March, a different coalition of states, led by Texas, accused Google of exclusionary conduct related to its plan to get rid of third-party cookies in Chrome. In other words, one tech giant is being sued for weakening privacy protections while another is being sued for strengthening them. How can this be?
That question, and others like it, are going to become increasingly urgent over the next few years. Antitrust enforcers are bringing cases against the biggest tech companies while states enact new privacy laws and Congress prepares (maybe, perhaps, hopefully) to pass one of its own. Meanwhile, those very companies are making all sorts of splashy changes to their privacy policies even as the government lawyers close in. If policymakers and enforcers can’t figure out the right way to think about how to reconcile privacy law with competition law, they risk badly screwing up both.
