In digital markets, digital platforms collect vast amounts of multidimensional consumer data and conduct data mining based on big data and artificial intelligence technologies to accurately profile consumers and understand their personalized needs, thereby enabling more precise personalized marketing. This significantly enhances consumer experience and promotes online market transaction efficiency, but also raises concerns about personal data privacy infringement. Meanwhile, the mutually reinforcement between data-driven platform market power and user privacy infringement has become a new mechanism of digital platform monopolization. How to scientifically address the complex relationship among consumer privacy, market competition, and innovation development has become an important policy challenge for digital platform antitrust regulation.
By constructing a two-sided platform oligopoly game model of data-driven business models, this analysis finds that platform relative market power is the fundamental cause of consumer privacy harm, and an increase in digital platform relative market power on either side of the market will exacerbate consumer privacy harm. Since an increase in consumer-side relative market power has both “consumer lock-in” and “merchant lock-in” effects, such an increase leads to more serious consumer privacy harm and social welfare loss. Meanwhile, the increasing integration and application of big data and artificial intelligence technologies exacerbates consumer privacy harm, whereas stronger consumer privacy preferences or stronger cross-network effects between both sides of platform users can suppress excessive data collection by digital platforms and help mitigate consumer privacy harm risks. Further analysis also finds that while adopting a consumer welfare maximization standard is conducive to achieving optimal privacy protection, it may hinder data-driven innovation. However, adopting a personal data collection payment mechanism can simultaneously achieve both optimal privacy protection and optimal data collection and utilization, though it requires effective antitrust policies as complementary measures.
The main policy implication of the above analytical conclusions are that consumer privacy protection should become an important focus of digital platform antitrust regulation. Excessive consumer data collection by dominant digital platforms should be prohibited by antitrust law. However, antitrust policies for data-driven monopolization by digital platforms need to consistently adhere to the principle of balancing consumer privacy protection with the promotion of data element utilization, emphasizing the establishment of a coordinated system between antitrust regulation and personal privacy regulation, adopting innovation-neutral antitrust regulatory policy instruments, and actively exploring pilot market-based privacy protection mechanisms.
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