기업의 프라이버시 증진 활동의 경쟁법 쟁점: 탐색적 고찰

The user data play a key role in sustaining the online advertising industry, where digital platform economy is mostly based on. As a wide range of user data are incessantly collected and utilized for targeting users, privacy concerns are frequently raised in this area. While the privacy policies recently rolled out by Google and Apple for phasing out third-party cookies and restricting mobile advertising identifiers which have been widely used for cross-web/app tracking are expected to bring about enormous impact to the advertising ecosystem, several competition authorities are taking a close look at the anti-competitive aspects thereof. Such recent trends are distinguished from the former enforcement cases, which were mostly merger cases and usually focused on the quality ‘degradation’ in terms of privacy protection, rather than its ‘enhancement’ as manifested in the present case. This study explores how to approach such novel trends by competition law and policy. Competition analysis of the present case may resort to the theoretical discussion developed from the former enforcement cases concerning the privacy protection level as an element of non-price competition, while identifying the structural difference and its implications on the analytical methods. This article reviews why it is required for data protection authorities and competition authorities to closely cooperate in conducting the competitive analysis and the decision-making processes for proper remedies (if required) in the present case. Under the circumstances where the big tech raises macroscopic concerns on the Internet governance as they are becoming so-called ‘private regulators’, such cooperation is required as a long term plan for designing integrated regulatory framework reflecting diverse policy considerations.