The European Council and the European Parliament have found an agreement on the "Digital Markets Act”. The goal of the bill is regulate the activity of internet giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, ensuring the upstream protection of competitioninstead of punishing abuses of dominant positions only after they have already damaged the market.
The "Digital Markets Act" obliges the network giants to follow about twenty rules and provides for particularly careful monitoring of purchasing transactions and situations in which companies favor their own services to the detriment of the competition.
"The agreement ushers in a new era of global technology regulation - said German People's Deputy Andreas Schwab, rapporteur of the text - The law on digital markets puts an end to the ever-increasing dominance of large technology companies".
Thierry Breton, European commissioner for the single market, added that, "in the face of large online platforms that behave as if they were 'too big to worry', Europe has put its foot down".
Here some innovations foreseen by the “Digital Markets Act”:
- the use of the data accumulated on the sites for the exclusive use of the same platform will be prohibited;
- you will not be able to use customer data for advertising purposes without having the consent of the people;
- you will not be allowed to impose your own applications on phones and computers;
- instead, alternative products must be available;
- the European Parliament has imposed interoperability between messaging systems such as Signal, Messenger and WhatsApp;
- finally, consumers will have to be free to choose which portal to use to download applications (ie, Apple will no longer be able to force its customers to use the App Store).
The “Digital Markets Act” will now have to be formally approved by both the Parliament and the Council. The entry into force is scheduled for January 2023.
Apple she said she was "concerned" by the content of the community regulation, while Google he said he feared "potential risks to innovation."
But there is also another text relating to the same subject and still under discussion: it is the Digital Services Act, with which the European Union intends to regulate the content of the platforms themselves.
