Data protection through the lens of competition law: will Germany lead the way?

On 2 March 2016, the Bundeskartellamt, the German competition authority, announced its decision to initiate proceedings against Facebook on suspicion that the social network provider had abused its dominant position by infringing data protection rules. Inge Graef and Brendan Van Alsenoy, Legal Researchers at the KU Leuven Centre for IT and IP Law, argue that the case represents the first attempt by a European competition authority to integrate data protection interests into competition analysis, and raises interesting questions about the interface between these two areas of law.