“Data” as an Object of Contracts/Within the Framework of Competition Law-1
It’s going to be a brief story that explains Competition Law itself, practice areas of competition law, the historic lineage of competition law and the “data” as a product of the free-market economy.
*This article will be divided into two articles to improve readability and due to the separate but combined nature of the topics.
In this article: “Why can data as a market product could be linked to competition law?” “What is competition law?” and “Brief history of competition law” will be discussed.
I chose this subject to underline how economics and law are two intertwined and closely related concepts and show that how "processable data" is a product in the market and that it is the subject of competition law as well as the subject of IT law. We are currently talking about which data is processed under which conditions. Ensuring privacy and security is one of our main goals. However, there is an unnoticed danger here. Due to the abundance of data, namely "big data," informs companies about how they can improve their products and earn money from you. They are important because the data is more than one person's personal data when it enters the market. As a market product, "Data" is more valuable than any other product on the market. So, if this data is collected in the hands of one person, wouldn't it be that one person's hands, is the “free-market” itself? Wouldn’t that person be the big market economy force in the “free market”?
Free-market economy is one of Europe’s fundamental principles. It allows businesses to thrive and provides consumers with a variety of choices. To gain customers, firms arrange their prices or offer higher quality products to be successful.
Development Competition Law in North America
After the Civil War in the US, there were major developments in both transportation and communications. With these revolutions, it became possible to sell products to other locations. The world became much smaller, and firms could able to grow faster and effectively. As a natural result, competition between firms and their products grew. With these revolutions in the 19th century, business enterprises intergraded in economic systems.
As a result of these transformative developments in North America in the late 19th century, large integrated national firms began to push smaller firms out of the game because they could still make big productions by making price reductions.
Consequently, smaller firms couldn’t compete with them fairly. The problem was simple: Big business enterprises could have been able to control both economic and political power. This affected social structure and legislative framework both in Canada and the US. After that, a lot of countries set their own rules about competition. With these big monopolies, the perceived threat to democracy and the free market these trusts represented led to the passage of the Sherman and Clayton Acts.
The Sherman Act authorized the Federal Government to institute proceedings against trusts in order to dissolve them. The purpose of the Sherman Act was not to protect competitors from harm from legitimately successful businesses, nor to prevent businesses from gaining honest profits from consumers, but rather to preserve a competitive marketplace to protect consumers from abuses.
After all these developments, competition policy grew and global compliance became the norm. For all of us, this meant that we were truly interconnected in a global community with this new form of economic organization and regulation.
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