The European Union passed a new antitrust law to crack down on the monopolistic behavior of technology giants
The European Union passed a new antitrust law to crack down on the monopolistic behavior of technology giants. The EU will strengthen supervision of large technology companies starting from 2023. Every large technology company has been investigated to one degree or another. The European Union passed new antitrust laws to crack down on the monopolistic behavior of technology giants. The European Union passed new antitrust laws to crack down on the monopolistic behavior of technology giants 1
After months of negotiations and procedural obstacles, the European Union has passed a pair of landmark bills aimed at controlling the power of big technology. The Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act aim to promote fairer competition, improve privacy protection, and ban some of the more egregious forms of targeted advertising and misleading practices.
For example, the Digital Services Law focuses on online platforms such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Their mission is to be more proactive with content moderation and prevent illegal or unsafe items from being sold on their platform. Users will also be able to understand how and why an algorithm recommended something to them, and challenge any algorithmic moderation decisions.
Finally, companies will no longer be able to use sensitive personal data for ad targeting, sell ads to children, or use dark patterns – deceptive page designs that can manipulate you into saying yes to something , even if you'd rather say "no", such as joining a service or preventing you from leaving a service you no longer want to use.
These obligations operate on a sliding scale, so the largest platforms will have the greatest obligations. Platforms with 45 million or more monthly users will undergo independent audits to ensure they prevent fake news and illegal content. These platforms must also make their algorithms and data available to (approved) researchers, allowing them to study the impact and potential harm the system may cause.
At the same time, the "Digital Market Law" focuses more on preventing platform leaders like Google, Microsoft and Apple from abusing their scale. This includes providing better interoperability with smaller rival services, ensuring files can be sent between systems.
There is also a big exception for app stores, where developers now have the right to contact their customers for transactions without going through the relevant platform holder. Platform holders will no longer be able to give their own systems preferential treatment, such as when Google promotes its own shopping services over those of its competitors.
The European Union has given full support to these two bills. If regulatory agencies find violations, they can impose penalties of up to 10% of the previous year’s total global turnover. . However, if officials find "repeat violations", this figure will rise to 20% of global turnover. That's a huge number that even Apple can't afford to lose regularly. As with GDPR's provisions, though, the EU still has questions to answer about how much effort, time and money it is prepared to put behind the agency that oversees big tech companies.
Now that it has been passed, the Digital Services Law will come into effect on January 1, 2024 (unless there are some procedural issues delaying it), while the Digital Market Law will come into effect shortly after, with major platforms ( Known as "gatekeepers") will have six months to get their own thing right before the new rules apply to them. The European Union passed a new antitrust law to crack down on the monopolistic behavior of technology giants 2
The European Parliament officially passed the "Digital Markets Act" (hereinafter referred to as "DMA") and the "Digital Services Act" proposed by the European Commission in December 2020 (hereinafter referred to as "DSA"), integrating it into a "Digital Services Package" (Digital Services Package), trying to solve the problem of so-called "gatekeeper" large technology companies.
Given the size of Apple’s annual turnover in the EU and the fact that it owns and operates platforms that attract large numbers of active users, Apple will almost certainly be classified as a “gatekeeper” and therefore will Subject to the rules of the DMA Act.
Under the bill, "gatekeeper" big tech companies must:
- Allow users to install apps from third-party app stores and sideload them directly from the Internet;
- Allow developers to offer third-party payment systems in their apps and promote offers outside of the gatekeeper's platform;
- Allow developers to integrate their apps and digital services directly with those who belong to "Gatekeeper" applications and digital services are integrated, including allowing messaging, voice calling and video calling services to interoperate with third-party services;
- Allowing developers to access any hardware functionality, such as " Near field communication technology, secure elements and processors, authentication mechanisms, and software used to control these technologies";
- Ensure that all applications are uninstallable and allow users to log in to them similar to subscriptions Under the conditions, unsubscribe from core platform services;
- Allow users to choose to change the default voice assistant service to a third-party choice;
- Share with developers and competitors Data and metrics, including marketing and advertising performance data;
- Establish an independent "compliance function" group with an independent senior manager to oversee its compliance with EU law and provide it with Grant sufficient powers, resources and management authority;
- Notify the European Commission of mergers and acquisitions transactions.
At the same time, the DMA bill also seeks to ensure that "gatekeeper" technology companies can no longer do the following things:
-Cannot pre-install certain software applications and require users to use any important Default software services, such as web browsers;
- App developers cannot be required to use certain services or frameworks (including browser engines, payment systems, identity providers, etc.) to list themselves in the app store Products of Private data collected by one service is reused in another service;
- Unfair conditions cannot be created for business users.
In addition, the DSA Act, which has also been approved by the European Parliament, requires that "gatekeeper" platforms must take more measures to regulate illegal content on the Internet.
According to the provisions of the DMA Act, non-compliant companies will face fines up to 10% of global total turnover; if they violate the rights repeatedly, they will face fines up to 10% of global total turnover. A fine of 10% of total global turnover, plus periodic fines of up to 5% of total global turnover.
In addition, if a "gatekeeper" company engages in "systemic infringements", the European Commission will be able to impose additional sanctions on it, such as forcing it to sell a business or part of its business (including units, assets, intellectual property or brand), or prohibit “gatekeeper” companies from acquiring any company that provides services in the digital space, etc.
So far, Apple has strongly resisted attempts by governments to make changes to its operating system and services. For example, Apple chose to pay a $5.5 million weekly fine in the Netherlands for several months rather than comply with an order from the country’s Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) to allow the use of third parties in Dutch dating apps. Payment system.
EU Antitrust Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has set up a DMA task force, with around 80 officials expected to join it, but some lawmakers have called for a larger A bigger task force to counter the power of Big Tech.
Now, the "Digital Services Package" only needs to be approved by the European Council before it can enter into force in the autumn.
Outside the EU, Apple’s ecosystem is also subject to increasingly stringent scrutiny from governments around the world, including those in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and more.
It is clear that global regulators are interested in exploring requirements around app sideloading and interoperability, and governments around the world are expected to collaborate further on this issue.
Some experts predict that there will be a "brutal battle" between Apple and global regulators. The European Union passed a new antitrust law to crack down on the monopolistic behavior of technology giants 3
As the European Union begins to strengthen supervision of large technology companies from 2023, each large technology company has been investigated to a greater or lesser extent.
A new report shows that EU antitrust regulators want to investigate Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Tencent, Netflix, Hulu and other large companies due to the video licensing policy of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM). technology companies.
AOM (Alliance for Open Media) was established on September 1, 2015. The goal is to develop a free, patent-free image encoding format to replace the image encoding H.264 and HEVC that require patent authorization.
According to public information, the Open Media Alliance is a non-profit organization that develops open image coding. Its goal is to develop a patent-free image coding format. As the successor of VP9 image coding, To replace the HEVC video encoding that requires patents, the founding members include Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix. The goal of the alliance is to develop a new video encoding format under the BSD 2 licensing terms, which will start from Elements taken from Daala, Thor and VP10.
According to Reuters, EU regulators are not satisfied with the alliance because the EU wants to know whether these companies have violated video licensing policies and whether and how this affects companies that are not part of the alliance. .
Earlier this year, EU antitrust regulators sent a questionnaire to a number of companies saying they were investigating "alleged anti-competitive conduct by AOM and its European members in relation to the terms of the AV1 license."
"Committee information indicates that the AOM and its members may impose licensing terms (mandatory royalty-free cross-licensing) on ??innovators who were not part of the AOM when the AV1 technology was created, but Their patents are considered key to (its) technical specifications," the document states.
"The European Commission confirmed that it is conducting a preliminary investigation into AOM's licensing policy," a spokesman for the European Commission told Reuters. "The fact that the European Commission conducted a preliminary investigation does not predict whether an infringement has occurred as a result of the investigation," the spokesman said, without providing further details.
So far, Apple, Google, Netflix, Broadcom, Cisco and Tencent did not respond to Reuters at the time of publication, while Meta and Amazon declined to comment.