ANTITRUST: Google Is Basically Daring The Federal Government To Block Its Fitbit Deal.

Google’s plan to buy Fitbit took chutzpah from the start. The company was already being investigated by Congress, state attorneys general, and federal antitrust regulators, a reflection of growing alarm over a conglomerate whose dominant market share is built on unrivaled access to personal data. Now it was announcing a $2.2 billion acquisition of a firm with troves of the most intimate details of its users’ physical health, from their heart rate to their exercise routines to how many hours they sleep at night. Fitbit was apparently worried enough about the threat of the deal being blocked that it negotiated a $250 million breakup fee in case of “a failure to obtain Antitrust Approvals.”

A week later, almost on cue, Makan Delrahim, the top antitrust official at the Department of Justice, suggested at a conference at Harvard that federal enforcers might start treating data privacy as a relevant issue in evaluating mergers. “It would be a grave mistake to believe that privacy concerns can never play a role in antitrust analysis,” he said. So there was some reason to wonder whether the Google-Fitbit deal would be the first casualty of the growing antitrust techlash.

And that was all before the Wall Street Journal reported this week on Google’s Project Nightingale, a mostly secret deal with one of the country’s largest nonprofit hospital networks granting Google free access to tens of millions of complete, nonanonymized patient records, which it is using to train an AI platform that will be able to customize patient care. (This is apparently legal, somehow, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.)

Is it? Is it really?