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.