{"id":5551,"date":"2018-03-21T10:51:30","date_gmt":"2018-03-21T14:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncjolt.org\/?p=5551"},"modified":"2020-06-04T20:52:32","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T20:52:32","slug":"not-like-us-facebook-google-may-run-afoul-european-regulators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/blogs\/not-like-us-facebook-google-may-run-afoul-european-regulators\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Like Us: Facebook and Google May Run Afoul of European Regulators"},"content":{"rendered":"

France\u2019s competition agency, Autorit\u00e9 de la concurrence<\/a>, reached a preliminary probe into online advertising with findings focused on\u00a0Facebook<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Google<\/a>\u2019s market dominance on March 6, 2018, setting up the possibility for more thorough antitrust investigations.
\nAccording to the agency, Facebook and Google\u2019s market power has yielded a \u201cfragile\u201d equilibrium in the online advertising sphere where stakeholders must contend with \u201ccompetition from global stakeholders.\u201d Facebook and Google both employ \u201cunrivaled volumes<\/a>\u201d of consumer data to bolster their competitive advantages, including of logged-in users who provide reams of data, offering advertisers the chance to reach incredibly broad and incredibly specific audiences. The authority report highlighted that the two companies acted as publishers and technical intermediaries for advertisers, giving them a competitive advantage.
\nBoth companies have already faced regulatory scrutiny. For example, the French data protection authority, the Commission national informatique et libert\u00e9s<\/a>, sanctioned Google in 2014 and Facebook in 2017 for collecting data without user consent. Europeans are far more sensitive to how their personal data are collected than their American counterparts, partly a result of their experience with totalitarian states.
\nIn an agreement with the government data protection agency in Ireland,\u00a0the company promised<\/a>\u00a0to tweak the Facebook site for users across Europe. Among other things, it promised to clarify how user data is employed to deliver advertising and to keep users\u2019 ad-click data for no more than two years. In addition, German regulators clashed with Facebook over companies using its \u201clike\u201d button to target advertising, as well as over some of its photo features.
\nBack in 2015, the EU launched a landmark antitrust case against Google Inc. What worries them was how companies such as Google, Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. amassed dominant positions in critical areas of technology and the Internet. Their rapid rise guaranteed that these firms will influence\u2014and profit from\u2014the major transformations under way across a host of industries. In the case against Google, EU regulators alleged that the company stifled competitors by \u201csystematically favoring\u201d its own shopping service in violation of the law. The 28-country EU also opened an investigation into potentially anti-competitive practices involving Google\u2019s Android mobile operating system.
\nEU Commission found that Google systematically gave prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service and demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results. The\u00a0European Commission\u00a0fined\u00a0Google a record-breaking $2.73 billion\u00a0for antitrust violations pertaining to its\u00a0Google\u2019s Shopping\u00a0search comparison service \u2014 in what was widely considered the most significant antitrust ruling in Europe since the\u00a02004 Microsoft decision<\/a>.
\nAntitrust enforcement has been one of the most significant differences in business law between the U.S. and the EU. While U.S. antitrust laws are in some respects more powerful than EU laws have been, enforcement has been more vigorous in the EU than in the U.S. in recent years.
\nArticle 81 of the European Community Treaty<\/a><\/a> prohibiting cartels and other \u201cconcerted practices\u201d that distort competition is roughly comparable to Section 1 of the Sherman Act<\/a> (the principal U.S. antitrust law), which outlaws concerted action to restrain trade.<\/a> In general, \u201cconcerted action\u201d for a Section 1 violation means that at least two companies must be involved in restraining trade, as opposed to unilateral action by one business. Price-fixing or bid-rigging are prime examples of illegal concerted action.
\nThe EU, in fact, has a counterpart to the Sherman Act\u2019s Section 2<\/a>, which prohibits the willful acquisition or maintenance of monopoly power.<\/a> Article 82 of the EC Treaty<\/a> states: \u201cAny abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the common market . . . shall be prohibited as incompatible with the common market insofar as it may affect trade between Member States.\u201d<\/a>
\nEuropean antitrust law places special obligations on powerful firms, said Ioannis Lianos<\/a>, a professor of competition law at University College London.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the U.S., if you have achieved dominance because you have been better or more aggressive, that\u2019s not a problem \u2013 in a way, it\u2019s kind of a cowboy thing,\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

he said. In Europe, a dominant firm \u201chas to be a gentleman to a certain degree.\u201d However, Facebook warned European lawmakers that too many rules would hurt the ability of Facebook and other companies to grow in Europe, saying that \u201cthere is a risk that an excessively litigious environment would impede the development of innovative services that can bring real benefit to European citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

France\u2019s competition agency, Autorit\u00e9 de la concurrence, reached a preliminary probe into online advertising with findings focused on\u00a0Facebook\u00a0and\u00a0Google\u2019s market dominance on March 6, 2018, setting up the possibility for more thorough antitrust investigations. According to the agency, Facebook and Google\u2019s market power has yielded a \u201cfragile\u201d equilibrium in the online advertising sphere where stakeholders must …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5553,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5551"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6961,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5551\/revisions\/6961"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}