He stressed peoples private information had become the lucrative oil for the digital age and its misuse could threaten to harm consumers and corporate competitors.
While Delrahim did not mention any specific company by name, the comments could have vast implications at a moment when the agency is investigating tech giants including Google.
Although privacy fits primarily within the realm of consumer protection law, it would be a grave mistake to believe that privacy concerns can never play a role in antitrust analysis, Delrahim said.
Later, he added, Without competition, a dominant firm can more easily reduce quality such as by decreasing privacy protections without losing a significant number of users.
Delrahims speech could bear special significance for tech giants including Amazon, Facebook and Google, which are confronting competition-focused investigations in Washington for their business practices. Such warnings are a familiar refrain in Europe, where antitrust regulators have probed and penalized tech giants for wielding their massive stores of data in anti-competitive ways.
With Amazon, a key concern is the e-commerce giants collection of sales data from third-party merchants and whether the tech giant is able to leverage that unique position against smaller rivals. In Facebooks case, the fear is that no competitor could ever launch a viable social network of their own because they could never match Facebooks stores of data a serious threat to users, experts say, given the companys pockmarked record on privacy.
And the Justice Department antitrust chief also stressed the agency is mindful about the effects on users as well: Just as antitrust enforcers care about companies charging higher prices or degrading quality as a sign of allocative inefficiency, it may be important to examine circumstances where companies acquire or extract more data from consumers in exchange for less.
Original article