Necessity of Antitrust Regulation for Data Privacy Protection

With the rapid development of digital economy, data privacy protection becomes critical dimension of quality competition, which is concerned with consumer interests and included in the multiple goals of modern antitrust law. Focusing on "notice-consent" regime, the existing laws and regulations of data privacy protection suffer a crisis of effectiveness and the remedy provided for lags behind the reality, yet antitrust regulation on data privacy protection has regulatory efficiency advantages. While the necessity of antitrust regulation on data privacy protection has been proved, this strategy may face challenges from perspective of antitrust methodology innovation, conflicts of law application, and problems on balancing different values. There is a need to reform industrial economy based traditional antitrust law and theory through integrating platform, data and algorithm. "Co-ken" theory and its application solves the dilemma on interests balance. Inspired by the idea of reg-tech, antitrust regulators shall pay attention to the use of blockchain and big data technologies, and establish an agile antitrust regulatory model to solve data privacy problems.