One of the great challenges for Brussels is to effectively comply with the digital market regulations.a revolutionary tool to control technology giants. The Spanish Teresa Ribera, appointed head of Competition for the next European Commission, knows this and has committed to this with the European Parliament. “I will promote the vigorous implementation of the digital market regulation (DMA),” responds to MEPs in writing before his in-person appearance on November 12, and adds: “Including fines where applicable.”
The still third vice president of the Government of Spain also sets as a priority the deployment of another norm, the regulation on foreign subsidies, another recent law that without saying it directly has one objective: monitor the aid that China gives to its companies in case they compete doped in the markets or thanks to them they acquire competitors to gain size.
The extensive history of violations of European competition rules that the large American technology companies accumulate is counted in billions of euros: Google, with permission from the courts, adds more than 8,000; Apple has appealed a fine of 1.8 billion; Microsoft opened the box decades ago with a landmark case. But abuses of dominant position and market violations have not stopped occurring. To change this and given the overwhelming dominance of these three companies and others such as Amazon, Meta or Bytedance, the EU has developed the DMA. This law basically consists of imposing additional obligations on these market giants to ensure that competition is not broken, instead of following the opposite path: starting a long investigation to verify that the law is not being complied with.
But there are voices that claim that some of these companies are reluctant to apply it. “The DMA is now fully in force, but not all platforms appear to be complying with it,” wrote Fiona Scott-Morton, a professor at Yale University and a respected expert on regulation and competition. in a recent article in Bruegel, the largest analysis institute in the community capital. “Europe cannot be the regulator of the world if its regulations do not change real behavior within a reasonable period of time,” he added.
And Ribera seems to pick up this gauntlet in his responses to the European Parliament: “We will shape the Commission’s policy in relation to this important instrument,” he explains about the DMA before it is ratified by the MEPs. The Spanish socialist does not point out any company in her writing, but there is one that appears in a sneaky way: Apple.
The still Minister of Ecological Transition of Spain points out that her first priority in developing this regulation is to open “closed ecosystems, whether on mobile phones, in digital searches or in purchasing applications for other applications.” In this phrase, this reference to Apple is precisely contained, since It is the company on which the first files governed by the DMA have been opened to force you to open the operating systems of iPhones and iPads so that other software developers can more easily offer products on these devices.
The other priority that Ribera points to is “giving opportunities to consumers.” “Large digital companies often impose their own terms and conditions on consumers, arguing that there is no better alternative,” he laments, pointing out a practice that needs to end. The third objective points to the great raw material of the technological universe, data: “Ensure that the data belongs to those who generate it. Citizens have the right to take their data wherever they want and decide if they want it to be used for advertisements or not,” he clarifies.
If finally the companies that have these obligations do not comply with them, then punishment will come, he warns: “I will not hesitate to use all the tools that the DMA provides.” One of them is, for example, investigating and pointing out what a company should do to open its digital ecosystem, something that community technicians are now doing with Apple. But there is more, the last one, of course, is the economic sanction. These punishments can reach up to 10% of global turnover and increase to 20% if the company repeats offenses.
Regarding the subsidies received by companies from third countries, something that MEPs also ask about, Ribera warns that if he achieves parliamentary ratification, he intends to deploy the new norm and that it will be “rigorous in operations in which there is aid from foreign countries.” of the EU”. The acquisition of not very large innovative European companies by companies from other economic areas is something to which the reports by Enricco Leto and Mario Draghi on competitiveness and the single market have drawn attention. They do not emphasize these operations carried out by subsidized companies but by large companies that have more financial resources. However, there are researchers who have pointed out what is happening in certain sectors and the acquisition of this type of companies by Chinese firms.
