The EU is Determined to take on Elite Tech companies in Silicon Valley in 2022 by quickly passing their Digital Services Act Legislation
In early June, Patently Apple posted a report titled "A European Parliament lawmaker states that the EU's upcoming DMA will force Gatekeepers like Apple to change their Lucrative Business Model." The Proposal by European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager last year, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) could force U.S. tech giants to change their lucrative business models and ensure a level playing field for smaller rivals.
The European Parliament lawmaker Andreas Schwab, which is leading the file for the EU body, stated in his report that "The DMA should be clearly targeted to those platforms that play an unquestionable role as gatekeepers due to their size and their impact on the internal market."
Schwab also proposed beefing up a list of don’ts set out by the Commission, among them a halt to tech giants to favoring their own services on their platforms or harvesting data from their platforms to compete with their business users."
Today a new report by the Financial Times states that "The wrangling between Brussels and Big Tech has taken a notable step up over the past year amid rising European concerns over how the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple use their dominant market positions.
Antitrust investigators in Brussels think they have a remedy to the slow speed of holding Big Tech to account. The Digital Services Act (DMA) and the Digital Markets Act are draft legislation aimed at, respectively, clarifying the policing responsibilities of large platforms and curbing their market powers.
There is political backing at a high level to pass the draft legislation in the first half of next year.
Andreas Schwab, the German MEP steering scrutiny of the debate of the DMA at the European parliament, thinks it is about time tough rules are set to limit the power of Big Tech, particularly the five largest companies. Schwab said in an interview with the Financial Times last month that regulators and the public have been 'cheated' by Big Tech for too long.
Yet sceptics point out that antitrust cases will take years to have an effect on the markets they are seeking to correct, and that they often come too late to save the rivals of Big Tech. The process is painfully slow. Investigations and the appeals process in EU courts take years. Will the DMA make a difference? Only time will tell.
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