In the European Union, stricter rules have been in effect for large online platforms since Thursday, which are intended to prevent abuse of power. The EU Commission has so far identified 22 services from six companies as so-called “gatekeepers” to which the new requirements apply.
Not surprisingly, the US tech giants are affected: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet and the Facebook group Meta. The video app TikTok from the Bytedance company, which originally comes from China, was also added to the list.
The requirements include, among other things, that the “gatekeepers” are not allowed to give preference to their own services over offers from competitors. In Google’s web search, information from specialized search engines from other companies is now presented in more detail. It is also prohibited to link data from different services without the express consent of the user.
For the first time, Apple now allows apps from marketplaces other than its own download store to be downloaded onto the iPhone. At the Facebook Group, the chat services WhatsApp and Messenger created the conditions for the integration of competing messaging services. But rivals like Signal and Threema show little interest in this and refer to their own data protection standards.
Violations of the DMA result in penalties of up to 10 percent of annual sales – and up to 20 percent in the case of repeated violations. The last option is to break up the property. In the end, courts could decide on possible punishments.
An exciting question is whether the EU Commission will accept Apple’s implementation of the DMA requirements. Some companies such as Spotify or the “Fortnite” developer Epic accuse the iPhone company of having designed the conditions for loading apps from other stores in such a way that this is not acceptable for many developers – and they prefer to use the previous model would stay.
Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has so far only emphasized that the Commission will examine the implementation of the DMA requirements as a priority. At the same time, she told the US news agency Bloomberg that the DMA solutions from large tech companies should not be “unattractive” for their customers and users. (dpa)