What's the "right" regulation for Facebook?

Competition Lore Podcast

Facebook has been taking fire on a host of fronts from governments and regulators around the world. One of the latest to take aim is the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in its Inquiry into Digital Platforms and their impact on media and advertising sectors.

In episode 20 of the podcast Dr Katherine Kemp explained the key findings and recommendations in the ACCC’s preliminary report, in which the Commission proposed changes to merger review and increased regulatory scrutiny as responses to Google and Facebook’s dominance of search, social media, advertising and news referral services markets.

In this episode, Facebook’s Associate General Counsel, Competition, Sam Knox explains why the social media giant regards many of the findings to be flawed and why the proposed new measures are either misguided or may in fact harm consumers.

The Inquiry website, with links to the Preliminary report and submissions, can be found here.

By way of postscript to the episode, in yet more bad news for Facebook, the German competition authority has decided that its fusion of data sets from across different services constitutes an exploitative abuse of dominance and has made orders for data separation in the absence of user consent. The Bundeskartellamt’s decision is here and Facebook’s initial response here.

Aside from assisting in setting up the interview, Facebook had no other input to the production of this episode.

Featuring regular cut-through interviews with leading thinkers, movers and shakers, Competition Lore is a podcast series that engages us all in a debate about the transformative potential and risks of digitalised competition.

Join Caron Beaton-Wells, Professor in Competition Law at the University of Melbourne, to tackle what it means to participate as a competitor, consumer or citizen in a digital economy and society.

Competition Lore is produced by Written & Recorded.

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