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• The Value of Personal Data in the Competition Law Assessment of the Facebook–WhatsApp Merger Case

  131-147

  Gábor Polyák

  Gábor Pataki

  Views:

  270

  The European Commission fined Facebook 110 million euros for giving misleading information within the merger procedure on acquiring the messaging service WhatsApp in 2014. The case reached a crossroad of competition law, data protection and consumer law. This was the first time the Commission imposed a fine on a company for inaccurate information since the merger regulation rules were established in 2004. Some authors criticized not only the Commission’s decision from 2017 which imposed the fine, but also the decision from 2014 in which the Commission had decided not to oppose the transaction. Some authors oppose tackling data collection issues through competition law, but some authors raise the question: is competition law enough to consider the case when personal data are involved, too? The controversial part of the decision is not about data protection law, but about the value of personal data from the perspective of competition law.

• Technology in Legal Regulation’s Service? Efforts in the Field of Data Protection

  33-45

  Zsolt György Balogh

  Attila Kiss

  Gábor Polyák

  Tamás Szádeczky

  Gergely László Szőke

  Views:

  210

  The interaction between technology and data protection is quite well-known and widely accepted in the legal literature concerning privacy protection. This essay tries to sum up the efforts to line up the technology itself to defend one’s privacy, often threated by technological development. The essay first shows the relevance of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), and the basic concept of the Privacy by Design principle, and then analyses both the current and the proposed European legal regulation focusing on these issues.

• Neighbouring Rights of Press Publishers: Issues Relating to Transposition

  Gábor Polyák

  Klára Szalay

  Views:

  250

  Press publishers spend billions on producing quality journalism each year. While the costs of producing well supported, quality journalism manifest in producing the original content, i.e. the very first copy, further costs – due to digitization – are negligible. Parallel to this, prosperous business models thrive on re-using articles in press publications, as well as optimizing them for search and social media platforms attractive enough to generate huge amounts of advertising revenue. But not for the those who actually make the content. The European Union seeks to persuade large digital companies to take part in the financing of European content, mainly through competition law or by taking steps to improve the competitive position of European companies. The rules relating to press publishers of the EU Copyright Directive of 2019 intend to serve this purpose and will be analysed in this paper.