The EU Digital Markets Act Places New Obligations on “Gatekeeper” Platforms
hubie writes:
The European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) has cleared a big hurdle to becoming a law:
The European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a proposal for bringing competition and fairness back to online platform markets. It just cleared a major hurdle on the way to becoming law in the EU as the European Parliament and the Council, representing the member states, reached a political agreement.
The DMA is complex and has many facets, but its overall approach is to place new requirements and restrictions on online "gatekeepers": the largest tech platforms, which control access to digital markets for other businesses. These requirements are designed to break down the barriers businesses face in competing with the tech giants.
[...] The DMA only places obligations on "gatekeepers," which are companies that create bottlenecks between businesses and consumers and have an entrenched position in digital markets. The DMA's threshold is very high: companies will only be hit by the rules if they have an annual turnover of 7.5 billion within the EU or a worldwide market valuation of 75 billion. Gatekeepers must also have at least 45 million monthly individual end-users and 100,000 business users. Finally, gatekeepers must control one or more "core platform services" such as "marketplaces and app stores, search engines, social networking, cloud services, advertising services, voice assistants and web browsers." In practice, this will almost certainly include Meta (Facebook), Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and possibly a few others.
The DMA restricts gatekeepers in several ways, including:
- limiting how data from different services can be combined,
- banning forced single sign-ons, and
- forbidding app stores from conditioning access on the use of the platform's own payment systems.
Other parts of the DMA make it easier for users to freely choose their browser or search engine, and force companies to make unsubscribing from their "core platform services" as easy as subscribing was in the first place.
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