Browsing by Subject "Digital Platforms"

The purpose of my thesis is to study the interrelationship between privacy and competition law in the context of the digital economy by evaluating both current and possible future paths of development. A starting point for the research is the assumption that digitisation and datafication have transformed market dynamics and created a pressure to integrate perspectives from the traditionally separate regimes of privacy and competition law. The research mixes doctrinal and legal theoretical methods to figure out how the privacy-competition law interrelationship has been construed in the EU competition case law so far, and how it should ideally be developed in the future, from the perspective of the goal of non-dominance, a conception of freedom developed within the political philosophy of republicanism which I argue forms the main underlying objective of both privacy and competition law. I will argue that developments in the case law show a continuous movement away from so-called separationists accounts of the privacy-competition interrelationship towards increasing integrationism. I will further argue that this is, especially if combined with new data-centered special legislation, the likely optimal development from a non-dominance point of view.