META Meta Platforms Inc

By Tom Fairless and Sam Schechner

Antitrust cops in France and Germany are preparing to conduct a joint study into how companies can gain market power by accumulating large sets of personal information, the European Union's antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said in a speech on Friday.

The move indicates the importance that antitrust authorities are attaching to the use of so-called big data--the large sets of personal information that are increasingly important for digital businesses, even though people typically hand the information over voluntarily when they use free services.

Some experts argue that these data sets could give major Internet firms an unfair edge over new rivals, and may therefore be relevant in deciding whether to approve mergers.

Speaking at the London School of Economics, Ms. Vestager said the big-data debate was of Europe-wide interest, and that all contributions are welcome.

During the EU's review of Facebook's $22 billion acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp last year, Europe's telecommunications operators had lobbied against the deal, warning it could give the merging companies excessive market power and control over users' data.

In its decision, the EU said Facebook's WhatsApp purchase didn't pose a concern because "there will continue to be a large amount of Internet user data that are valuable for advertising purposes and that are not within Facebook's exclusive control."

Lawyers for major technology companies claim that the concerns around big data are misplaced, arguing that such information is ubiquitous, widely available and of fleeting value.

But in an interview last month, Ms. Vestager said that not "everyone would agree with that line of thinking."

"Your access to data, the way you can process data, of course is a crucial asset in almost any industry as we see it now," Ms. Vestager told The Wall Street Journal.

Write to Tom Fairless at tom.fairless@wsj.com and Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 20, 2015 07:19 ET (12:19 GMT)

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