Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim, chief of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, warned tech titans that the government is investigating the nexus between consumer data collection and market power and will pursue them for anticompetitive behavior derived therefrom. The antitrust enforcer broached this and other words of warning during his keynote address at the “Challenges to Antitrust in a Changing Economy” conference held at Harvard Law School on Nov. 8.
Delrahim compared consumers’ private information to “oil” for the digital age, calling the “collection, aggregation, and commercial use of consumer data … analogous to a new currency.”
