Germany‘s Federal Cartel Office: Facebook‘s data collection and aggregation – an abuse of a dominant market position

The German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) has issued a landmark ruling concerning the collection and aggregation of data by Facebook, holding the practices of the company to breach German anti-trust laws. The decision comes as a surprise to many and will have wide-ranging effects, meaning that compliance with data protection laws is now no longer merely a matter for data protection supervisory authorities, but also for anti-trust regulators. This is the end of the “One Stop Shop“ the GDPR promised, and means potentially higher fines – up to 10 % of a company‘s annual world-wide turnover. The FCO‘s decision might also be the starting point of a discussion as to what extent companies (whether dominant or not) can still rely on the argument that their data processing activities are required for the performance of a contract.