IMCO

Shortly before the summer recess, MEPs at the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee concocted close to 1200 amendments to the Digital Markets Act, a proposal construing the category of a gatekeeper and a set of obligations for internet services that qualify as one. Let’s take a look at what the Shadow Rapporteurs, the most important people in the process, proposed and how Rapporteur Andreas Schwab tackled their proposals to date if it comes to expanding users’ choice and autonomy over their data through the DMA.

Who’s talking?

As customary in committee work, each political group designated a representative to debate the DMA report. With Adreas Schwab (EPP, DE) at the helm, the Shadow Rapporteurs are: Evelyne Gebhardt (S&D, DE); Andrus Ansip (RE, EE); Virginie Joron (ID, FR), Martin Schirdewan (GUE, DE), Marcel Kolaja  (Greens, CZ), and Adam Bielan (ECR, PL). Each of them, either individually or with colleagues, filed amendments to the DMA.

Contributions span from reinforcing the autonomy of users, through supporting businesses making use of platforms’ intermediation, to supporting platforms themselves. There is no surprise in the fact that the more left of the political spectrum we look, the more important users’ rights are. Having said that, almost each Rapporteur has an interesting proposal on how to make our life on the platforms easier.

Who is in the scope?

With the exception of ECR’s Adam Bielan, all Shadows want to expand the scope of services that could become gatekeepers. Voice assistants, for which the market is highly concentrated, are on everyone’s list, except Kolaja’s. The Green’s Shadow wants to add connected TV and embedded digital services in vehicles, which include those enabling access to audio-visual content. MEPs Gebhardt and Schirdewan expand on the audio-visual, adding services providing audio and video on demand and streaming services respectively.

We’ve seen the draft report on the Digital Markets Act from the leading Committee, and we are not impressed. Rapporteur Andreas Schwab imagines the DMA as a tool to take swift action against the biggest players in online markets. But the key issues that could help consumers, about whom the Committee for Internal Market and Consumer Protection should be most concerned, remain unresolved.

The usual suspects

The German Christian-Democrat MEP’s vision of the DMA targets the biggest platforms, by raising quantitative thresholds of how rich and popular one has to be to qualify as a gatekeeper. A quick check of whose annual EEA turnover is €10 billion in the last three financial years or market capitalisation is at least €100 billion in the last financial year, and which services have over 45 million monthly users, reveals that Schwab is targeting the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook Amazon, Microsoft).

The rumour in town is that platforms such as booking.com don’t want to be bound by the same regulatory measures as the giants that are bigger and wealthier by an order of magnitude, and… that originate from the US. This could be considered beneficial, if one views only the five to be the source of most online evils. Except that it is not entirely future-proof if a new core service emerges and does a lot of damage before they actually reach the high financial thresholds. Not to mention that such an approach further entrenches the online ecosystem in which online intermediation is practically divided among the five companies.