[kictanet] JUST OUTLAWED FACEBOOK'S WHOLE AD BUSINESS

[Mutindi Muema]

Dear listers,

I have come across this article in Wired... I would like to hear your
thoughts on the same and the viability of such a regulatory approach.


 The article reads in part :

On Thursday, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, the country’s antitrust
regulator, ruled
<https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Meldung/EN/Pressemitteilungen/2019/07_02_2019_Facebook.html>
that
Facebook was exploiting consumers by requiring them to agree to this kind
of data collection in order to have an account, and has prohibited the
practice going forward.

“Facebook will no longer be allowed to force its users to agree to the
practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to
their Facebook user accounts,” FCO president Andreas Mundt said in a
statement announcing the decision.

“We disagree with their conclusions and intend to appeal so that people in
Germany continue to benefit fully from all our services,” Facebook wrote in
a blog post responding
<https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/02/bundeskartellamt-order/> to the
ruling. The company has one month to appeal. If it fails, Facebook would
have to change how it processes data internally for German users, and could
only combine the data into a single profile for a Facebook account with
that user's explicit consent....


“The FCO’s theory is that Facebook’s dominance is what allows it to impose
on users contractual terms that require them to allow Facebook to track
them all over,” Khan says. “When there is a lack of competition, users
accepting terms of service are often not truly consenting. The consent is a
fiction.”

As a dominant company Facebook is subject to special obligations under
competition law. In the operation of its business model the company must
take into account that Facebook users practically cannot switch to other
social networks,” said Mundt. “The only choice the user has is either to
accept the comprehensive combination of data or to refrain from using the
social network. In such a difficult situation the user’s choice cannot be
referred to as voluntary consent.”

But Facebook says that tracking people makes the services safer and better,
and that the FCO misses how much the company has done
<https://www.wired.com/story/new-facebook-privacy-settings/> in order to
comply with the General Data Protection regulation passed by the European
Union in 2018.

The FCO’s ruling, however, directly addresses the GDPR, writing that under
its principles Facebook has “no effective justification for collecting data
from other company-owned services and Facebook Business Tools or for
assigning these data to the Facebook user accounts.” (Facebook Business
Tools here can be anything from the Like and Share buttons that appear all
over the internet, and which allow Facebook to track you on sites it
doesn’t own, to analytic tools Facebook provides businesses.) In other
words, in addition to being anticompetitive in its view, the FCO believes
Facebook hasn’t proven that data collection and bundling is in the best
interest of every consumer and that its sites couldn’t function without
it.....


Facebook is appealing.


The full article is accessible at :

https://www.wired.com/story/germany-facebook-antitrust-ruling/?CNDID=49357372&CNDID=49357372&bxid=MjM5NjgxNjc1ODE1S0&hasha=2f3f5cee7dd9a7e82d6a508f7da48ea4&hashb=513f791e98d869ce527a12d34030891f4881c8a1&mbid=nl_020819_daily_list1_p4&source=DAILY_NEWSLETTER&utm_brand=wired&utm_mailing=WIRED%20NL%20020819%20(1)&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nl


Kind regards,
Mutindi.
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