Workshop: Platform dominance and privacy harms: What role for civil society in competition policy

There’s a trend for digital platforms such as social media, search engines and online retailers to concentrate enormous powers due to their processing of vast amounts of personal data. The market powers of these corporations can cause both privacy and economic harms, including degradation of service quality, misuse of personal data and discrimination or exclusion from opportunities due to profiling technologies. Increasing exploitation of this data, combined with micro-targeting by corporations have also resulted in practices (for e.g. ‘fake news’) which have negative impact on the working of democratic institutions. As a result, there are calls for authorities to reform competition regulation to address the data protection implications and the societal challenges posed by these data-exploiting corporations.

This interactive workshop, after a briefing on the issues, will discuss the role of NGOs in the shaping of a competition policy that is capable to address such threats by corporate platforms.

Facilitator: Anna Fielder, Senior Policy Advisor, Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD)

Speakers:

  • Orla Lynskey, Associate Professor of Law, LSE
  • Agustin Reyna, Head of Legal and Economic Affairs, BEUC

See full program here.