Yesterday, Brussels designated the six big tech companies that will now be subject to compliance with the new digital markets law (DMA, in its acronym in English), the new anti-monopoly directive to reduce the excessive power of the platforms digital At the moment, they include Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Microsoft and Meta.
From now on, the six companies will be required to comply with rules that will affect a total of 22 services. Among which will be social networks such as TikTok (by ByteDance), Facebook and Instagram (Meta), instant messaging services (WhatsApp Messenger, by Meta) and browsers such as Chrome and Safari. Also the most used operating systems, iOS and Android, and app stores (Apple Store and Google Play).
The new law that entered into force almost a year ago will involve more obligations, but also more facilities for the same companies. They will be able to know in advance the requirements they will have to meet, such as notifying the European Commission in advance when they want to acquire another company. In this way, they will not have to wait for Brussels to initiate an investigation that usually lasts years to determine whether or not they respect free competition.
The services of the Competence of the Executive have been fighting against the big technologies for years, especially because users have, for example, the freedom to say which applications they want to install. The new directive will allow any user to choose applications from competing stores (Apple users will be able to use Google Play, if they wish). In addition, it will be prohibited to cross-reference the personal data that companies acquire through the different services (such as Facebook to Instagram) without consent. Search engines will also not be able to promote their own products in their search engines (as happened with Google, with a historic fine of more than 2,000 million euros and confirmed by European justice in 2021).
Also, financial institutions will achieve one of the big requests, that of being able to offer alternative payment services to users, aside from bank cards or Paypal. Always with the consent of the users, the banks will be able to have access to their data.
Brussels believes that these platforms and their services may have the ability to distort the market. For this reason, the Executive has marked these requirements that they will have to meet within six months at the most. New rules change to catch up with a changing digital world. Until now, the way in which the large technology companies had carried out their activities was not sufficiently regulated or they adhered to a set of rules that often predated the digital economy and were out of date. “It was time for Europe to set the rules of the game from the beginning in order to ensure the fairness and openness of the digital markets”, indicated in a statement the Commissioner of the Internal Market, Thierry Breton.
According to the Community Executive, the six platforms comply with the requirements set by Brussels and are subject to the directive. Among which, exceed a turnover of at least 7,500 million euros in the EU in the last three years or have a market value of 75,000 million in the last fiscal year, or at least 45 million active users, more than 10,000 business users per year and operate in at least three member states.
For now, the European Commission has decided not to include Samsung or its browser in this first round of companies subject to the DMA, because according to Brussels they have “presented sufficiently motivated arguments” for not being included. Just like Google’s mail service, Gmail, and Microsoft’s Outlook.
On the other hand, the Executive reported that it opened four investigations to analyze whether the messaging services Bing (from Microsoft) and iMessage (Apple) will have to comply with the obligations of the directive; as well as the Edge browser and Microsoft Advertising. In addition, it opened a second market investigation to Apple to determine whether iPadOS should enter the directive. Brussels will be able to impose fines equivalent to 10% of a company’s total global turnover if it does not comply with its obligations, or 20% in case of recidivism; ultimately, it could force a restructuring of the company.
