CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Kapu, Azra |
|---|---|
| Title | From Right to Remedies: The Interplay of Data Protection and Competition Law in the Context of Data Portability |
| Summary | The intersection of data protection and competition law in the enforcement of data portability rights presents fundamental questions about how these rights can be effectively implemented to enhance user autonomy and promote market competition. While Article 20 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) established a groundbreaking framework for individual data portability rights, its practical effectiveness remains constrained by significant limitations including narrow scope restrictions, technical implementation challenges, and enforcement gaps that particularly affect competitive digital markets. Subsequent EU legislation, including the Digital Markets Act and Data Act, has expanded data portability obligations beyond the GDPR's framework, reflecting a regulatory evolution from purely user-centric rights toward broader competition-oriented tools. However, these instruments retain limitations in addressing market-wide competitive concerns, particularly regarding enforcement mechanisms and scope of application. The centerpiece of this analysis is the Turkish Competition Authority's decision in the Sahibinden case, which imposed data portability obligations as behavioral remedies under competition law. This landmark decision demonstrates how competition authorities can address data portability restrictions as abuse of dominance, going beyond traditional data protection approaches to mandate comprehensive technical infrastructure for seamless data transfers. The Turkish approach overcame key GDPR limitations by requiring bidirectional data portability, encompassing broader data categories, and ensuring real-time updates without consent-related fragmentation. The analysis concludes that effective data portability enforcement requires coordination between data protection and competition law frameworks. The Sahibinden decision provides a valuable template for European competition authorities, demonstrating that competition law remedies can be more effective than individual rights-based approaches in achieving systematic market-level changes. Competition enforcement can recognize data portability restrictions as clear abuse of dominance when they raise switching costs and suppress multi-homing, offering a roadmap for addressing contemporary digital market challenges through sophisticated behavioral remedies. |
| Supervisor | Botta, Marco |
| Department | Legal Studies LLM |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/kapu_azra.pdf |
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