The post is commentary on the podcast. It does not describe a new enforcement action and does not name a specific case or ruling. The most concrete related development is in the EU, where the European Data Protection Board and the European Commission planned an October 15, 2026, stakeholder consultation on joint guidelines covering how data protection law and competition law interact. The source does not report the consultation's outcome or whether the guidelines have been finalized. On the U.S. side, the FTC's privacy docket lists recent actions, including FTC v. Digital Forensics Corporation, LLC, et al. (October 9, 2026), but none of them is an antitrust matter.
The overlap is not new. Germany's competition authority in the Facebook case was the first major example of enforcers using data-protection principles to inform competition law, and France later fined Apple over privacy conditions it applied to its own apps compared with third-party apps. Apple's app-tracking policy is under investigation by several antitrust authorities. In the U.S., the Justice Department's case against Google found that Google illegally monopolized the ad tech market under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Regulators in many countries now treat information exchanges and algorithmic price setting as equivalent to explicit collusion. Since 2024, roughly 40 states and U.S. territories have joined at least one multistate action involving antitrust, data privacy, AI or consumer protection. Delaware has also lowered the consumer threshold for its privacy law from 35,000 to 10,000. Privacy teams should review data-sharing arrangements and algorithmic pricing tools for competition exposure, and track the EU guidelines and state privacy thresholds as they develop.