The European Union is working on new measures that seek to curb, once again, the market power of large Internet companies. According to information provided by sources related to Brussels regulators to the Financial Times, a list of 20 companies is being created that would have to follow stricter standards than those imposed for the market in general.
How would the 20 firms be selected for this list? According to the information, criteria are being defined such as the company’s income, the number of users or that the brand has an essential tool that other companies need to use. Therefore, it is believed that Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook could be some of those that meet the requirements to be on this list.
These 20 brands, according to the leaked information, would have to follow a more rigorous regulation that is yet to be known. Two of the rules would force companies to be more transparent and to share information with smaller companies. It remains to be seen how such concepts will be put into practice.
All this is based on the idea, according to the sources of this information, that ” the immense power in the market of these companies is not good for competition.”
So far, the main measure that the European Union has against practices that may be abusive are the fines that are imposed as punishment. With the new regulation that Brussels is working on, these fines – which are sometimes seen as an extra cost of business activity – will be joined by preventive measures that lead the giants to share information with their competitors.
It seems, according to the information available at the moment, that the big losers from this new strategy will be the US tech giants. How will Washington take this? EU countries and the capital of the North American country already have several open disputes in this regard.
France and the Netherlands prepare a document for Brussels that asks for greater supervision of big technology
In addition to this information leaked from the heart of the European Union, it has also been known that France and the Netherlands have created a joint document that they intend to send to the European Commission (executive arm of the EU) in which they propose a series of stricter rules to supervise large technology companies, which also include the aforementioned Alphabet (Google), Facebook and Amazon, according to CNBC.
The two countries suggest that there is an EU authority that can control the market position of large technology platforms. Cédric O , secretary of state for the digital transition in France affirms in the aforementioned report that the ambition is “to design a framework that is efficient enough to address the economic footprint that these actors leave on the European economy”.
According to the leaked information, this document is intended to help Brussels officials who are working on legislative proposals they want to present by the end of 2020 on this issue.
This issue is not something new and it has confronted Washington with Brussels on several occasions. Last June the United States Chamber of Commerce suspended its negotiations with Europe for the creation of a digital tax at the global level. The reason? Literally the spokesmen of the Chamber said they “defend their companies” from the aforementioned “Google rate” by countries such as Spain or France.
The fixation of the European Union with the giants of Silicon Valley is a very recurring theme. The taxes they pay , the legislation regarding privacy or the transparency that they have to show comes long .
For his part, the spokesman for the European Commission, Christian Wigand, has denied Technoeager these differences and has defended that European laws, such as GDPR (the European data protection law), apply to any operator established in the EU ” regardless of the “nationality” of the company “.
