Report: EC Nears “Political Agreement” on Digital Markets Act
17 MARCH 2022 - The European Commission is looking to move ahead with the Digital Markets Act, and soon. This one has been out there for a while, and I had to go back and re-familiarize myself with the particulars. I found a write-up I did from a December 2020 edition of “Mac OS Ken.” That had the BBC explaining:
The Digital Markets Act centres on the regulation of "gatekeepers" - those behind "entrenched" services that other businesses use to provide their own products.
This covers the operators of search engines, social networks, chat apps, cloud computing services and operating systems, among others.
They are likely to include Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.
The idea is to prevent the firms gaining unfair advantages via their elevated positions.
Under the proposed legislation, companies would be required to:
Tell competition regulators of any acquisition plans
Not give their own services place of prominence when displaying them and competing services
“Not use data gathered via their main service to launch a product that will compete with other established businesses”
Let users pull pre-installed apps and use other software in its place
Failure to comply would not be pretty. For the Digital Markets Act, the European Commission could issue fines of up to 6% of a company’s annual take in Europe. “And,” the BBC said:
...“recurrent infringers” are warned that they could be made to divest “certain businesses, where no other equally effective alternative measure is available to ensure compliance.”
That is a threat to break-up big tech companies if they can’t follow the rules…
The legislation has been batted around since, though a piece from Apple Insider has Margrethe Vestager, competition commissioner for the European Union saying it’s time to wrap things up. The piece has her indicating “that there has been good progress in negotiations…” She and hers are hoping to reach a “political agreement” by the end of this month. Citing a Reuters report, the piece has her saying, “If we manage that, that will be legislation with almost the speed of lightning…” Indications in the piece are that lawmakers want all of the “i”s dotted and “t”s crossed by the end of June.
