Coherence Between Data Protection and Competition Law in Digital Markets

In digital markets, data protection and competition law affect each other in diverse and intricate ways. Their entanglement has triggered a global debate on how these two areas of law should interact to effectively address new harms and ensure that the digital economy flourishes. Coherence between Data Protection and Competition Law in Digital Markets offers a blueprint for bridging the disconnect between data protection and competition law and ensuring a coherent approach towards their enforcement in digital markets.

Specifically, this book focuses on the evolution of data protection and competition law, their underlying rationale, their key features and common objectives, and provides a series of examples to demonstrate how the same empirical phenomena in digital markets pose a common challenge to protecting personal data and promoting market competitiveness. A panoply of theoretical and empirical commonalities between these two fields of law, as this volume shows, are barely mirrored in the legal, enforcement, policy, and institutional approaches in the EU and beyond, where the silo approach continues to prevail. The ideas that Majcher puts forward for a more synergetic integration of data protection and competition law are anchored in the concept of ’sectional coherence’. This new coherence-centred paradigm reimagines the interpretation and enforcement of data protection and competition law as mutually cognizant and reciprocal, allowing readers to explore, in an innovative way, the interface between these legal fields and identify positive interactions, instead of merely addressing inconsistencies and tensions. This book reflects on the conceptual, practical, institutional, and constitutional implications of the transition towards coherence and the relevance of its findings for other jurisdictions.

Klaudia Majcher, Assistant Professor at the Competition Law and Digitalization Group, Vienna University of Economics and Business

Klaudia Majcher is an Assistant Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (Research Group on Competition and Digitalization). She is also as a Senior Associate Fellow at the Free University of Brussels (Brussels School of Governance), where in 2020 she obtained her doctoral degree for the dissertation on coherence between EU data protection and competition law. She conducted parts of her research at the Fordham Law School in New York. Between 2018 and 2020, Klaudia worked as a Digital Policy Analyst at the European Political Strategy Centre, the Brussels-based in-house think-tank of the President of the European Commission. In 2013, Klaudia received her LL.M. degree in European Law from the University of Leiden.