Counsel Paolisa Nebbia (Rome/Milan/Brussels-Antitrust) discusses the Italian Competition Authority’s opening of a market investigation on big data in e-Competition.

The Italian Competition Authority, together with the national regulators for communications and data protection, opened a joint market investigation on Big Data. The investigation appears to be wide-ranging, covering not only competition issues, but data protection, consumer protection and pluralism in the digital ecosystem. The investigation follows closely, in time, the report published by the French and German competition authorities on May 16, 2016, thus signalling a high level of attention across the EU towards the ever-increasing role played in our economies by data collection, processing and use.