Competition: EU agrees to regulate digital giants

Published on: 25/03/2022 – 01:23 The European institutions found a compromise on Thursday on the Regulation of digital markets, new legislation which aims to impose on digital giants a series of obligations and prohibitions in order to stem anti-competitive practices. This regulation, which is expected to come into force in 2023, could have international repercussions. The Member States of the European Union (EU), the Commission and the European Parliament reached an agreement on Thursday 24 March on new legislation which should put an end to the abuse of a dominant position by digital giants. After several months of negotiations, a A compromise has been sealed between the European institutions on the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is to impose on Gafam – Google, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Amazon and Microsoft – a series of obligations and prohibitions allowing to stem anti-competitive practices. For the French Secretary of State for Digital, Cédric O, this is “the most important economic regulation of recent decades”. And it could have international repercussions. “The agreement ushers in a new era of technology regulation worldwide. The Digital Markets Act puts an end to the ever-increasing dominance of big tech companies,” said MEP Andreas Schwab, rapporteur for the text. Change of philosophyThe regulation, whose entry into force is expected in January 2023, marks a change of philosophy in the fight against the abuses of the big platforms. After years of chasing in vain after the infringements of these multinationals in endless legal proceedings , Brussels wants to act upstream, by imposing on them around twenty rules to be respected under penalty of dissuasive fines. Objective: to act quickly and effectively, before abusive behavior has destroyed competition. The text only targets the largest platforms: Gafam and perhaps a handful of other groups such as the online booking company Booking or the TikTok social network. The list remains to be defined according to already established criteria of turnover, market capitalization and number of users. There “will be profound consequences” on the activity of these firms, estimates Katrin Schallenberg, of the consulting firm lawyers Clifford Chance.Apple “concerned”In a reaction sent to AFP, the American group Apple said it was “concerned” about “certain provisions (which) will create unnecessary privacy and security vulnerabilities for our users, while others will forbid us to charge for the intellectual property in which we invest a lot”. the Commission. The legislation establishes Commission control over all takeover operations of these giants, regardless of the size of the target, to limit the capture of innovation start-ups and avoid takeovers with the sole purpose of killing a competitor. In all, it lays down around twenty rules to curb the abuses observed in recent years. Thus, the big platforms will be prohibited from showing favoritism towards their own services in search engine results, as Google has been accused of doing with its online sales site Google Shopping. The new law will prevent these giants from using the data generated on their site by client companies to better compete with them, as Amazon has been criticized for.French priorityThe text, which was one of the main priorities of the French Presidency of the Council of the EU, will also better protect users in making their consent mandatory for the cross-referencing of data from several online services for advertising profiling purposes. use of alternative products. In the home stretch, the European Parliament also obtained the addition of interoperability messaging services which, for example, will allow a Signal user to communicate with a contact using WhatsApp (Meta). case of recurrence. With AFP