The German Competition Authority holds that matching the data collected by a social network company constitutes an antitrust violation (Facebook)

Doing double damage: The German competition authority’s Facebook decision manages to undermine both antitrust and data protection law* The German Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office or FCO) this week reached a decision in its nearly 3-year-old Facebook investigation. The decision appears to be based not on a violation of competition rules per se, but, at root, on alleged violations of European data protection rules. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some commentators — who view the case from a purely idiosyncratic, outcome-driven perspective — are praising the agency. But the reality is that the decision is unsound from either a competition or privacy policy perspective and will only make the fraught privacy/antitrust relationship worse. The FCO decision is incoherent competition policy