ryan - Is Europe closing in on an antitrust fix for surveillance technologists? â€“ TechCrun

The German Federal Cartel Officeâ??s decisionآ*to order Facebook to change how it processes usersâ?? personal data this week is a sign the antitrust tide could at last be turning against platform power.

One European Commission source we spoke to, who was commenting in a personal capacity, described it as â??clearly pioneeringâ?* and â??a big dealâ?*, even without Facebook being fined a dime.

The FCOâ??s decision instead bans the social network from linking user data across different platforms it owns, unless it gains peopleâ??s consent (nor can it make use of its services contingent on such consent). Facebook is also prohibited from gathering and linking data on users from third party websites, such as via its tracking pixels and social plugins.

The order is not yet in force, and Facebook is appealing, but should it come into force the social network faces being de facto shrunk by having its platforms siloed at the data level.

To comply with the order Facebook would have to ask users to freely consent to being data-mined â?? which the company does not do at present.

Yes, Facebook could still manipulate the outcome it wantsآ*from users but doing so would open it to further challenge under EU data protection law, as its current approach to consent is already being challenged.

The EUâ??s updated privacy framework,آ*GDPR, requires consent to be specific, informed and freely given. That standard supports challenges to Facebookâ??s (still fixed) entry â??priceâ?? to its social services. To play you still have to agree to hand over your personal data so it can sell your attention to advertisers. But legal experts contend thatâ??s neither privacy by design nor default.

The only â??alternativeâ?? Facebook offers is to tell users they can delete their account. Not that doing so would stop the company from tracking you around the rest of the mainstream web anyway. Facebookâ??s tracking infrastructure is also embedded across the wider Internet so it profilesآ*non-users too.

EU data protection regulators are still investigating a very large number of consent-related GDPR complaints.

But the German FCO, which said it liaised with privacy authorities during its investigation of Facebookâ??s data-gathering, has dubbed this type of behavior â??exploitative abuseâ?*, having also deemed the social service to hold a monopoly position in the German market.

So there are now two lines of legal attack â?? antitrust and privacy law â?? threatening Facebook (and indeed other adtech companiesâ??) surveillance-based business model across Europe.

A year ago the German antitrust authority also announced a probe of the online advertising sector, responding to concerns about a lack of transparency in theآ*market. Its work here is by no means done.

Data limits

The lack of a big flashy fine attached to the German FCOâ??s order against Facebook makes this weekâ??s story less of a major headline than recent European Commission antitrust fines handed to Google â?? such as the record-breakingآ*$5BN penaltyآ*issued last summer for anticompetitive behaviour linked to the Android mobile platform.

But the decision is arguably just as, if not more,آ*significant, because of the structural remedies being ordered upon Facebook. These remedies have been likened to an internal break-up of the company â?? with enforced internal separation of its multiple platform products at the data level.

This of course runs counter to (ad) platform giantsâ?? preferred trajectory, which has long been to tear modesty walls down; pool user data from multiple internal (and indeed external sources), in defiance of the notion of informed consent; and mine all that personal (and sensitive) stuff to build identity-linked profiles to train algorithms that predict (and,آ*some contend, manipulate) individual behavior.

Because if you can predict what a person is going to do you can choose which advert to serve to increase the chance theyâ??ll click. (Or as Mark Zuckerberg puts it: â??Senator, we run ads.â??)

This means that a regulatory intervention that interferes with an ad tech giantâ??s ability to pool and process personal data starts to look really interesting. Because a Facebook that canâ??t join data dots across its sprawling social empire â?? or indeed across the mainstream web â?? wouldnâ??t be such a massive giant in terms of data insights. And nor, therefore, surveillance oversight.

Each of its platforms would be forced to be a more discrete (and, well, discreet) kind of business.

Competing against data-siloed platforms with a common owner â?? instead of a single interlinked mega-surveillance-network â?? also starts toآ*sound almost possible. It suggests aآ*playing field thatâ??s reset, if not entirely levelled.

(Whereas, in the case of Android, the European Commission did not order any specific remedies â?? allowing Google to come up with â??fixesâ?? itself; and so to shape the most self-serving â??fixâ?? it can think of.)

Meanwhile, just look at where Facebook is now aimingآ*to get to: A technical unification of the backend of its different social products.

Such a merger would collapse even more walls and fully enmesh platforms that started life as entirely separate products before were folded into Facebookâ??s empire (also, letâ??s not forget, via surveillance-informedآ*acquisitions).

Facebookâ??s plan to unify its products on a single backend platform looks very much like an attempt to throw up technical barriers to antitrust hammers. Itâ??s at least harder to imagine breaking up a company if its multiple, separate products are merged onto one unified backend which functions to cross and combine data streams.

Set against Facebookâ??s sudden desire to technically unify its full-flush of dominant social networks (Facebook Messenger; Instagram; WhatsApp) is a rising drum-beat of calls for competition-based scrutiny of tech giants.

This has been building for years, as the market power â?? and even democracy-denting potential â?? of surveillance capitalismâ??s data giants has telescoped into view.

Calls to break up tech giants no longer carry a suggestive punch. Regulators are routinely asked whether itâ??s time. As the European Commissionâ??s competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, was when she handed down Googleâ??s latest massive antitrust fine last summer.

Her response then was that she wasnâ??t sure breaking Google up is the right answer â?? preferring to try remedies that might allow competitors to have a go, while also emphasizing the importance of legislating to ensure â??transparency and fairness in the business to platform relationshipâ?*.

But itâ??s interesting that the idea of breaking up tech giants now plays so well as political theatre, suggesting that wildly successful consumer technology companies â?? which have long dined out on shiny convenience-based marketing claims, made ever so saccharine sweet via the lure of â??freeâ?? services â?? have lost a big chunk of their populist pull, dogged as they have been by so many scandals.

From terrorist content and hate speech, to election interference, child exploitation, bullying, abuse. Thereâ??s also the matter ofآ*how they arrange their tax affairs.

The public perception of tech giants has matured as the â??costsâ?? of their â??freeâ?? services have scaled into view. The upstarts have also become the establishment. People see not a new generation of â??cuddly capitalistsâ?? but another bunch of multinationals; highly polished but remote money-making machines that take rather more than they give back to the societies they feed off.

Googleâ??s trick of naming each Android iteration after a different sweet treat makes for an interesting parallel to the (also now shifting) public perceptions around sugar, following closer attention to health concerns. What does its sickly sweetness mask? And after the sugar tax, we now have politiciansآ*calling for a social media levy.

Just this week the deputy leader of the main opposition party in the UK called for setting up a standalone Internet regulatory with the power to break up tech monopolies.

Talking about breaking up well-oiled, wealth-concentration machines is being seen as a populist vote winner. And companies that political leaders used to flatter and seek out for PR opportunities find themselves treated as political punchbags; Called to attend awkward grilling by hard-grafting committees, or taken to vicious task verbally at the highest profile public podia. (Though some non-democratic heads of state are still keen to press tech giant flesh.)

In Europe, Facebookâ??s repeat snubsآ*of the UK parliamentâ??s requests last year for Zuckerberg to face policymakersâ?? questions certainly did not go unnoticed.

Zuckerbergâ??s empty chair at the DCMS committee has become both a symbol of the companyâ??s failure to accept wider societal responsibility for its products, and an indication of market failure; the CEO so powerful he doesnâ??t feel answerable to anyone; neither his most vulnerable users nor their elected representatives. Hence UK politicians on both sides of the aisle making political capital by talking about cutting tech giants down to size.

The political fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal looks far from done.

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Quite how a UK regulator could successfully swing a regulatory hammer to break up a global Internet giant such as Facebook which is headquartered in the U.S. is another matter. But policymakers have already crossed the rubicon of public opinion and are relishing talking up having a go.

That represents a sea-change vs the neoliberal consensus that allowed competition regulators to sit on their hands for more than a decade as technology upstarts quietly hoovered up peopleâ??s data and baggedآ*rivals, and basically went about transforming themselves from highly scalable startups into market-distorting giants with Internet-scale data-nets to snag users and buy or block competing ideas.

The political spirit looks willing to go there, and now the mechanism for breaking platformsâ?? distorting hold on markets may also be shaping up.

The traditional antitrust remedy of breaking a company along its business lines still looks unwieldy when faced with the blistering pace of digital technology. The problem is delivering such a fix fast enough that the business hasnâ??t already reconfigured to route around the reset.آ*

Commission antitrust decisions on the tech beat have stepped up impressively in pace on Vestagerâ??s watch. Yet it still feels like watching paper pushers wading through treacle to try and catch a sprinter. (And Europe hasnâ??t gone so far asآ*trying to impose a platform break up.)آ*

But the German FCO decision against Facebook hints at an alternative way forward for regulating the dominance of digital monopolies: Structural remedies that focus on controlling access to data which can be relatively swiftly configured and applied.

Vestager, whose term as EC competition chief may be coming to its end this year (even if other Commission roles remain in potential and tantaliz ing contention), hasآ*championed this idea herself.

In an interview on BBC Radio 4â??s Today program in December she poured cold water on the stock question about breaking tech giants up â?? saying instead the Commission could look at how larger firms got access to data and resources as a means of limiting their power. Which is exactly what the German FCO has done in its order to Facebook.آ*

At the same time, Europeâ??s updated data protection framework has gained the most attention for the size of the financial penalties that can be issued for major compliance breaches. But the regulation also gives data watchdogs the power to limit or ban processing. And that power could similarly be used toآ*reshape a rights-eroding business model or snuff out such business entirely.

#GDPR allows imposing a permanent ban on data processing. This is the nuclear option. Much more severe than any fine you can imagine, in most cases. https://t.co/X772NvU51S

â?? Lukasz Olejnik (@lukOlejnik) January 28, 2019

The merging of privacy and antitrust concerns is really just a reflection of the complexity of the challenge regulators now face trying to rein in digital monopolies. But theyâ??re tooling up to meet that challenge.

Speaking in an interview with TechCrunch last fall, Europeâ??s data protection supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, told us the blocâ??s privacy regulators are moving towards more joint working with antitrust agencies to respond to platform power. â??Europe would like to speak with one voice, not only within data protection but by approaching this issue of digital dividend, monopolies in a better way â?? not per sectors,â?* he said. â??But first joint enforcement and better co-operation is key.â?*

The German FCOâ??s decision represents tangible evidence of the kind of regulatory co-operation that could â?? finally â?? crack down on tech giants.

Blogging in support of the decision this week,آ*Buttarelli asserted: â??It is not necessary for competition authorities to enforce other areas of law; rather they need simply to identity where the most powerful undertakings are setting a bad example and damaging the interests of consumers.آ* Data protection authorities are able to assist in this assessment.â?*

He also had a prediction of his own for surveillance technologists, warning:آ*â??This case is the tip of the iceberg â?? all companies in the digital information ecosystem that rely on tracking, profiling and targeting should be on notice.â?*

So perhaps, at long last, the regulators have figured out how to move fast and break things.



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