Personal Data Exploitation as Excessive Pricing: A Review of the Bundeskartellamt Facebook Case

In 2019, the Bundeskartellamt sanctioned Facebook (now Meta) for abusing its dominant position in the market for social media for private users by imposing abusive privacy terms and conditions on consumers. Some have been critical of this decision, pointing out that this is a case that could have been approached from the perspective of excessive pricing abuse of dominance. In this article, we address this question and apply the excessive pricing benchmarks to the Bundeskartellamt v. Facebook cas