Privacy as Property: An Antitrust Approach to Data Governance

Edited by Joe Su, Skandha Gopinath, and Sofia Meinardus

Abstract

Current antitrust legislation and the metric used to measure monopolistic behavior are insufficient to capture the full breadth of costs consumers incur from the use of digital services. The companies offering most digital services extract increasing volumes of individual-specific, sensitive data to profit more from users, leveraging human experiences and behavior as an exploitable resource. This note proposes a potential avenue of recourse, namely, through antitrust legislation to regulate the behavior of data extractive firms.