Listening yesterday to the EDPB–European Commission stakeholder discussion on the interplay between competition law and data protection, I was struck by how deeply entrenched certain ways of thinking remain. There has certainly been some progress over the years, but not nearly enough.
What we need is not simply more cooperation between authorities, or further guidance on how two distinct legal frameworks interact. We need something more fundamental: an evolution in the way each discipline thinks, incorporating insights from the other into its own analytical framework. And with AI reshaping both the uses of data and the sources of market power, this intellectual evolution is becoming increasingly urgent.