What Are the Policy Implications if Data Is Non-rivalrous?

Abstract This chapter explores the clash between privacy and competition, which has been largely unexplored by policymakers and the literature to date. It reviews competition policies, which seek to “democratize” personal data by circulating and redistributing the data with sufficient privacy safeguards to maximize its overall value. It also looks at competition policies that focus on “data-openness” by increasing data portability, improving interoperability, and requiring powerful platforms to share some of the personal data with rivals. The chapter explains that once privacy’s data-minimization principles are effectively applied, there will likely be less data to democratize, and competition, innovation, and data philanthropy can potentially suffer. Promoting data-openness policies, however, increases the risk of a surveillance economy where the public is the commodity. It also points out that while many people can use the data to glean insights without reducing the data’s value for others, the repeated mining of the data can impose a negative externality on our privacy. Thus, the fact that personal data is non-rivalrous does not necessarily point to the optimal policy outcome.