EU designates six big tech gatekeepers under DMA, introduces provisions for fines

The European Commission on Wednesday designated, for the primary time, six gatekeepers – Alphabet (Google’s dad or mum firm), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft – underneath the Digital Markets Act (DMA) with provisions for hefty penalties for non-compliance.

In complete, 22 core platform providers supplied by gatekeepers have been designated within the EU.

The six gatekeepers will now have six months to make sure full compliance with the DMA obligations for every of their designated core platform providers, the fee mentioned in an announcement.

In case a gatekeeper doesn’t adjust to the obligations laid down by the DMA, the Commission can impose fines as much as 10% of the corporate’s complete worldwide turnover, which might go as much as 20% in case of repeated infringement.

“With today’s designation we are finally reining in the economic power of 6 gatekeepers, giving more choice to consumers and creating new opportunities for smaller innovative tech companies, thanks for instance to interoperability, sideloading, real-time data portability and fairness,” mentioned Thierry Breton, Commissioner for Internal Market.

In parallel, the Commission has additionally opened 4 market investigations to additional assess Microsoft’s and Apple’s submissions arguing that, regardless of assembly the thresholds, a few of their core platform providers don’t qualify as gateways, like Microsoft: Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising and Apple’s iMessage.

“Under the DMA, these investigations aim to ascertain whether a sufficiently substantiated rebuttal presented by the companies, demonstrate that services in question should not be designated. The investigation should be completed within a maximum of 5 months,” mentioned the Commission.In addition, the Commission opened a market investigation to additional assess whether or not Apple’s iPadOS needs to be designated as gatekeeper, regardless of not assembly the thresholds. Under the DMA, this investigation needs to be accomplished inside a most of 12 months.

Moreover, the Commission discovered that, though Gmail, Outlook.com and Samsung Internet Browser meet the thresholds underneath the DMA to qualify as a gatekeeper, Alphabet, Microsoft and Samsung supplied sufficiently justified arguments exhibiting that these providers don’t qualify as gateways for the respective core platform providers.

“Therefore, the Commission decided not to designate Gmail, Outlook.com and Samsung Internet Browser as core platform services. It follows that Samsung is not designated as gatekeeper with respect to any core platform service,” it mentioned.

The Commission mentioned it’s going to monitor the efficient implementation of and compliance with these obligations.

In case of systematic infringements, the Commission can also be empowered to undertake extra cures reminiscent of obliging a gatekeeper to promote a business or components of it or banning the gatekeeper from acquisitions of extra providers associated to the systemic non-compliance.

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