Section on competition versus privacy

[darobin]

An earlier draft featured this:

From an economics standpoint, it is important to note that the broad sharing of data can lead
to anticompetitive outcomes, notably due to network effects stemming from processing data across
multiple [=contexts=] [[?BIG-DATA-COMPETITION]]. Restricting flows of [=data=] between
different [=contexts=] (and not just [=parties=]) is therefore likely to improve competition.

I know that some here are worried about scope or pushing for a shorter document. I do believe that some topics are hard to avoid, even if it's just to say that they are to be covered elsewhere. I'm doing a literature review on this — I propose to share what it could look like in this document and the group can see where it goes.

[jyasskin]

And I believe the argument here is that negative GDPR outcomes like https://www.applicoinc.com/blog/how-gdpr-is-helping-big-tech-and-hurting-the-competition/ and The Competitive Effects of the GDPR were a result of that law focusing on cross-party data sharing rather than cross-context sharing.

[darobin]

Longer write-up https://berjon.com/competition-privacy/.

[torgo]

Possibly we need something on this in the Ethical Web Principles.

[darobin]

We should point to the discussion that will be in the EWP.

[jyasskin]

We could have one #WhyNotBoth sentence saying we can usually get both competition and privacy, similar to the sentence in https://w3ctag.github.io/privacy-principles/#hl-recognition-cross-context that

In many cases it's possible to change the design in a way that avoids the violation without breaking valid use cases

[dmarti]

This document could include some mention that there is interaction between privacy and competition policy.

Some combinations of privacy laws, regulations, and regulator budgets could have pro competitive effects, and some combinations that can have anti competitive effects. (For example, if same-company/different-context violations are harder for regulators to catch than inter-company violations, then apparently neutral privacy regulations could have unwanted anti-competitive impact)

[lknik]

Is it a potential duplicate of w3ctag/ethical-web-principles#63 (which is broader, not limiting to privacy vs competition, but X vs Y)?

[jyasskin]

@lknik I think w3ctag/ethical-web-principles#68 is closer: the current EWP has https://w3ctag.github.io/ethical-web-principles/#multi saying the web architecture should encourage competition between browsers, OSes, and devices, but not saying the same for websites or other entities using the web. It should add something in that direction, and then also say (per w3ctag/ethical-web-principles#63) that it's sometimes necessary to handle conflicts.

The point @darobin was making here, which I think is worth including in the privacy principles document if we can make it short, is that privacy and competition are in conflict less often than one might expect.

[jyasskin]

We've added https://w3ctag.github.io/privacy-principles/#balancing on the general subject of apparent tradeoffs, and during that discussion (#105) the task force seems to have concluded that we want non-privacy concerns to live in a different document, so I think we can close this issue.