European Parliament to give final green light to regulation of digital giants
Digital Markets Act
Today, the European Parliament has voted in favour of the Digital Markets Act, which will regulate digital platforms acting as gatekeepers, enable more market fairness for businesses, and end-users, and improve data protection.
Marcel Kolaja MEP, Member of the Pirate Party and Greens/EFA shadow rapporteur in the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, comments:
“Thanks to our pressure, gatekeepers will need to make their messaging services interoperable for other providers free of charge. In practice, this means that alternative platforms will be able to enable users to send and receive messages to/from dominant platforms such as WhatsApp. Thanks to interoperability, users will finally be able to choose communication platforms based on their real needs and easily move to more privacy-friendly services without fear of losing contact with their loved ones. I am truly happy about the negotiations’ outcome. Users need to have full control over their technology and that is what I have been saying from the very beginning. We now need to go even further: the Commission has the obligation to examine if big tech has to enable interoperability for social networks as well."
Kira Peter-Hansen MEP, Greens/EFA shadow rapporteur in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, comments:
“With this proposal, the EU has proudly taken the global lead in regulating tech giants and protecting consumers. We now have the chance to structurally limit the market power of companies like Facebook, Google and Apple, and to improve competition and innovation. This will lead to more choice for consumers in the future. The Commission must now ensure that the DMA is enforced, and that enough staff is allocated to it.”
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The European Parliament voted on the outcome of the trilogue negotiations. The proposal lays down harmonised rules to oversee the behaviour of digital platforms and ensure that practices by very few large digital companies do not negatively impact competition and innovation across the single market and limit consumer choice.
