Antitrust Law and Data Processing: With Big Data Comes Big Responsibility Lexology

Through rapid digitalization and agile technology, the concept of "data" has become the new raw material of business, being regarded as an economic input almost on a par with capital and labor.[1] As modern computing power has expanded our ability to collect, process, store, and analyze data on a large scale, it also started to raise complex questions about the commercial nature of the accumulated "big data" and the implications for competition in numerous industries across the global economy. In that same vein, as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and the Internet of Things (IoT) promise to render big data analytics a central feature of virtually every area of commerce, antitrust figures – lawyers, economists, and agencies – contend to define big data in the parlance of antitrust and analyze it in light of the world's antitrust laws. What is "Data" in the Eyes of Antitrust Enforcers? Before delving into which characteristics of big data are antitrust-related, it is of vital importance to see what exactly "data" is from an antitrust law perspective.