Law

Covering Prying Eyes with an Invisible Hand: Antitrust Law, the New Brandeis Movement, and Privacy

By Matthew Sipe (University of Baltimore)

The increasingly prominent New Brandeis movement in antitrust law hopes, among other policy goals, to use authority over competition to improve consumer privacy. This Article takes a skeptical view of those efforts. Somewhat counterintuitively, the more aggressive and structuralist New Brandeis school of thought risks undermining consumer privacy, rather than enhancing it. To some extent, this is a privacy-specific problem, but it also suggests larger issues with the neo-Brandeisians’ intentions of pursuing broader social goals that do not naturally follow from enhanced market competition.

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