The European Parliament and the French Council Presidency have reached an agreement on the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
“The agreement is the beginning of a new era for tech regulation worldwide. The Digital Markets Act puts an end to the ever-increasing dominance of big tech companies”, said Andreas Schwab MEP.
Schwab leads the negotiation team of the European Parliament.
“From now on, digital companies must show that they allow fair competition on the internet. That can be enforced more easily with the new rules. This means that the time of long antitrust cases, during which the authorities were lagging behind the big tech companies, is over. Europe is thus ensuring more competition, more innovation and more choice for users”, said Schwab.
With the DMA, Europe is setting standards for how the digital economy of the future works. Now it is up to the European Commission to implement the new rules quickly.
“As the European Parliament, we have made sure that the DMA will immediately deliver tangible results. Consumers will get the choice to use core services of big tech companies such as browsers, search engines or messaging, and all that without losing control over their data”, Schwab explained.
“One concrete example is that smaller messenger services will be allowed to interconnect with WhatsApp or Messenger in the future. Consumers will then be able to write messages to each other across different services.”
Schwab stressed that the new digital law avoids any form of over-regulation for small businesses. “App developers will get completely new opportunities, small businesses will get more access to business-relevant data and the online advertising market will become fairer”, Schwab concluded.
To make sure that the law targets the big platforms, those that weigh too much on the market, today’s agreement foresees to apply the new rules to companies with a stock market valuation of €75 billion, a €7.5 billion annual turnover and a minimum of 45 million users per month. Web browsers and virtual assistants will be added to the list of core platform services in the scope of the DMA.
