The EU has designated "gatekeeper" companies under the DMA

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Horatio

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  • #1
    The EU released its first set of "gatekeeper" companies under the Digital Markets Act.
    Digital Markets Act: Commission designates six gatekeepers (europa.eu)

    Interestingly, Twitter is absent from the Social media category, and the only apps in the messaging category are both Meta apps (WhatsApp and Messenger). Messenger really surprises me - I barely know anyone that uses it, but maybe it's also an EU thing.

    Unsurprisingly, the iOS and Google app stores are in there, but Google already supports alternate app stores (and sideloading) - how Apple reacts will be interesting here.
     
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    analogika

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  • #3
    Mark086 said:
    Tell Europe to go fuck themselves.
    Click to expand...

    Why?

    I mean, I get that people are all up in their jingoistic knickers about this being a political thing, because (in this case) it affects American companies. (In all other cases, Americans only ever read about it at all when American companies are affected.)

    But just putting aside the fact that most companies that meet the criteria are, in fact, American — and, just for the argument, assuming that the criteria weren’t designed to exclude euro services, but that there are no European services that would compete:

    What exactly is your criticism of the bill in itself? Are you opposed to government efforts to try and make corporations behave responsibly?

    Incidentally, I’m surprised that Telegram isn’t on the list.
     
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  • #5
    It's truly sad that EUROPE feels it necessary to regulate AMERICAN companies (plus ByteDance). It's truly sad.

    It's sad because they should have been hyper-aggressively regulated and probably broken up under anti-trust laws in their home countries (mostly the US) LONG before it even became an issue before the EU. The US is toothless with most regulation, so we'll see how this plays out. The EU can be a little jingoistic at times, and the EU is not the right venue for this regulation, but it's all there is.
     
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  • #6
    Nevarre said:
    It's truly sad that EUROPE feels it necessary to regulate AMERICAN companies (plus ByteDance). It's truly sad.

    It's sad because they should have been hyper-aggressively regulated and probably broken up under anti-trust laws in their home countries (mostly the US) LONG before it even became an issue before the EU. The US is toothless with most regulation, so we'll see how this plays out. The EU can be a little jingoistic at times, and the EU is not the right venue for this regulation, but it's all there is.
    Click to expand...
    Presupposing they should be broken up is entirely flawed.
     
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  • #7
    Mark086 said:
    It's entirely a political thing.

    Write a policy that says companies need to provide interoperability if you want; but, this is just a torch bearing mob to rob the fancy coaches like highwaymen.
    Click to expand...

    So because you think ONE POINT on a whole catalogue of things (including one that Google has already been fined for in the past) could be handled differently, the whole thing is purely political, and Europe can go fick themselves?

    How do any of the DMA‘s regulations amount to „robbery“, specifically?


    As for actual content —
    IMHO, this one’s kind of a biggie:

    „Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:

    treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform“

    That’s an antitrust issue, and it’s got companies in hot water in the past. The new regulations define a „responsibility threshold“.
     
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  • #8
    Mark086 said:
    Presupposing they should be broken up is entirely flawed.
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    The word „presupposing“ is the opposite of „drawing a conclusion from observing past behaviour“.

    I don’t want Google to be destroyed. I don’t want Apple to be destroyed. I don’t want Meta to be destroyed. I want them to fucking respect how we do business here, follow the goddamn laws, and for there to be real leverage to enforce the law when they do not.
     
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    Horatio

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  • #9
    analogika said:
    treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
    Click to expand...
    I like this one because it clamps down on some especially shitty behavior from Amazon, and to a lesser extent Google. For Apple, this could be interesting, since they make apps that compete with 3rd party apps, but they don't need to pay the 30% cut.
     
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  • #10
    We’ll see how it plays out for Amazon — they’re a sales platform and never made any allusions to the contrary. It does need to stop, though — or be made transparent.

    Google, however, has always given the impression of being a neutral mediator between your browsing/search history and what they think you’re looking for.
    Abusing that standing to push their own shopfronts got them fined 2.4 BILLION € some years ago, already.


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  • #13
    Mark086 said:
    It's entirely a political thing.

    Write a policy that says companies need to provide interoperability if you want; but, this is just a torch bearing mob to rob the fancy coaches like highwaymen.
    Click to expand...
    Oh dear, won't someone think of the trillionaires!?

    What is your exact complaint, other than that it's mean to American megacorps that have more money than many economies?
     
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  • #16
    Mark086 said:
    The Eat the a rich mentality is fantastic, until you realize you're Rich from someone else's perspective.
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    Yes, all laws must treat all cases and entities EXACTLY the same, because ensuring the obscenely wealthy stay at the top and ossifying socioeconomic strata is the only way to ensure a truly level playing field.

    Fuck right off with that. A company worth trillions has enormous advantages to skirt regulations and straight up ignore the law. They don't need extra help by paying politicians to force smaller companies to play by the exact same rules.

    What is your exact complaint? How is this an unjust regulation?
     
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  • #17
    Mark086 said:
    until you realize you're Rich from someone else's perspective.
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    The US has a Gini coefficient of 0.49. The EU's is 0.3. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which society has the fattiest, most nourishing rich to eat. The fat makes the flavour richer, I only eat rich with a total net worth of over $100 million, and whose wealth has been aged for at least 150 years.

    BTW, the US used to be at 0.36 until the Reagan administration, when it quite literally started to skyrocket. The rich get richer, and everyone wins when their piss trickles down on us!

    I dunno, I guess some Americans can't possibly conceive of a society where there AREN'T people who are obscenely wealthy and you have NOTHING in comparison, from your perspective? I gotta say, I'm pretty comfortable living in a country where the poorest of the poor are about as less well off from me as I am from the richest of the rich.
     
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  • #19
    I have some criticisms, but not the "'Murica!" kind. I think this will have a chilling effect on the growth of companies, EU and otherwise - if I saw that I had a service in nearly any covered category approaching say ~40M users, I would slow the fuck down in terms of growth. It would also prevent exits for those kind of companies where normally they'd be ripe for an acquisition, but if the acquiring company is already regulated in by the DMA, they might think twice, in part due to the existing heightened scrutiny from being in the "auto-antitrust" category, and because any acquirer is going to look towards growth as a reason to acquire.
     
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    wrylachlan

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  • #20
    Horatio said:
    I have some criticisms, but not the "'Murica!" kind. I think this will have a chilling effect on the growth of companies, EU and otherwise - if I saw that I had a service in nearly any covered category approaching say ~40M users, I would slow the fuck down in terms of growth. It would also prevent exits for those kind of companies where normally they'd be ripe for an acquisition, but if the acquiring company is already regulated in by the DMA, they might think twice, in part due to the existing heightened scrutiny from being in the "auto-antitrust" category, and because any acquirer is going to look towards growth as a reason to acquire.
    Click to expand...
    Those sound like pretty great results to me… if you can’t increase profits by limitless growth and cashing out when a whale buys you then the other alternative is increasing the cost of your offering. And the only way that flies is if you increase it’s value.

    So if the net result here is lots of small organizations choosing to stay small and shoot for high quality, I’m all for that.
     
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  • #21
    wrylachlan said:
    Those sound like pretty great results to me… if you can’t increase profits by limitless growth and cashing out when a whale buys you then the other alternative is increasing the cost of your offering. And the only way that flies is if you increase it’s value.
    Click to expand...
    Well, increasing the cost isn't the only way to get more revenue - monetizing user data and/or shipping a fuck ton of ads is another, and they won't have the same limitations as the big guys will have (though the EU is good about the default bar on user data with the GDPR). I think it would be nice to have the restrictions apply gradually as you move from say 45M to 60M users, giving incentive for the company to grow and adapt to the auto-antitrust restrictions.
     
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  • #22
    Horatio said:
    Well, increasing the cost isn't the only way to get more revenue - monetizing user data and/or shipping a fuck ton of ads is another, and they won't have the same limitations as the big guys will have (though the EU is good about the default bar on user data with the GDPR). I think it would be nice to have the restrictions apply gradually as you move from say 45M to 60M users, giving incentive for the company to grow and adapt to the auto-antitrust restrictions.
    Click to expand...
    That’s a good observation and yeah, we might see some on-the-cusp-of-gatekeeper software turn to the dark side of shitty ad-driven software. But I tend to think that’s self-limiting. If billions of new places to put ads start showing up, the value of each of those ads will go down. And new markets will pop up to serve ad-free versions of the same software.

    I don’t hate the idea of a graduated enforcement.
     
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  • #24
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    wco81

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  • #26
    Hope springs eternal.

    With the potential of AI to disrupt the order of things in technology, Europe hopes they can not only compete better in AI versus American companies, they hope the next Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. will rise from the Continent.

    They are pushing VCs to fund EU startups, including many founded by Europeans who worked in California returning home to apply the experience they gained working for the same "anti-competitive" tech companies that the EU likes to target.

    The 31-year-old Frenchman is chief executive of Mistral, a startup that achieved a €240m (£206m) valuation in its first round of financing – four weeks after it was founded. And he believes artificial intelligence (AI) will be the great leveller, putting Europe on a par with its previously uncatchable competitors across the Atlantic.


    Mistral develops large language models – the technology that underpins AI tools such as ChatGPT – and Mensch believes this could hand the initiative to a continent producing a new wave of fast-moving startups.


    “Given the new tools we have to hand, like large language models, everything has to be rebuilt around them. When something has to be rebuilt, it gives new players an advantage because they can go fast,” he says.


    Mensch, a former employee of Google’s AI unit, now called Google DeepMind, is part of a big-tech European diaspora that has served an apprenticeship of sorts with big US firms and is now going it alone. And he has already achieved standing among his peers: he will be attending the global AI safety summit this week with other tech chief executives, world leaders, experts and civil society figures at Bletchley Park in the UK.
    Click to expand...
    Read in The Guardian: https://apple.news/A_PTnaa84SP6bd3oB88jy-A

    Europe is a world leader in an array of industries from fashion to pharmaceuticals, cars and aerospace, but it has underperformed in tech, despite a skilled workforce, formidable academic talent and the opportunities afforded by the single market.


    There is no European equivalent to Amazon, Google’s owner Alphabet, Facebook’s parent Meta or tech industry grandees such as Apple or Microsoft. Together with Elon Musk’s Tesla and chip maker Nvidia, this so-called Magnificent Seven have opened up a wide gulf between New York’s stock exchanges and the bourses of London, Paris and Frankfurt.
    Click to expand...

    So maybe the DMA and DSA could help if these European startups fail to keep up with American companies, which are placing their own huge bets on AI.

    Certainly DMA and DSA have already put targets on most of the big US tech companies. It also looks like they don't have to wait until AI is a huge business before they act to prevent already rich companies in the DMA and DSA list from leveraging their advantages in other products and services to pull ahead in whatever kinds of business models which prevail in AI.
     
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  • #28
    We have the other thread where some of us has already laid out some of the aspects of this DOJ case. We're going to have a lot of chances to discuss the merits.

    One big difference is that DOJ is bringing this case under existing anti-trust law while the EU went to the trouble of crafting new legislation, in which all of the targets or designated gatekeepers are only US companies and one Chinese company, no EU company at all.
     
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  • #29
    wco81 said:
    We have the other thread where some of us has already laid out some of the aspects of this DOJ case. We're going to have a lot of chances to discuss the merits.

    One big difference is that DOJ is bringing this case under existing anti-trust law while the EU went to the trouble of crafting new legislation, in which all of the targets or designated gatekeepers are only US companies and one Chinese company, no EU company at all.
    Click to expand...

    The EU anti-trust judgement following the Spotify complaint was based on violation of existing legislation, not the "Gatekeeper" legislation discussed in this thread.
     
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  • #30
    analogika said:
    The EU anti-trust judgement following the Spotify complaint was based on violation of existing legislation, not the "Gatekeeper" legislation discussed in this thread.
    Click to expand...
    True.

    Do you think there won't be more enforcement actions under the DMA and DSA?

    DMA and DSA holds the sword over the gatekeepers and makes them modify their practices, without necessarily bringing cases.
     
    analogika

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  • #31
    wco81 said:
    True.

    Do you think there won't be more enforcement actions under the DMA and DSA?

    DMA and DSA holds the sword over the gatekeepers and makes them modify their practices, without necessarily bringing cases.
    Click to expand...

    Sure. But that affects neither the EU case, nor the DoJ case. You claimed the DMA/DSA as a difference to the DoJ case — and it isn't.
     
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  • #32
    analogika said:
    Sure. But that affects neither the EU case, nor the DoJ case. You claimed the DMA/DSA as a difference to the DoJ case — and it isn't.
    Click to expand...
    I was replying to Megalodon, who said that the DOJ case announced today proves that the EU prosecution has merit and isn't some anti-American action.

    I disagreed with his contention, pointed out that the DMA/DSA only targets US firms and one Chinese firm.

    But that doesn't mean the Spotify case isn't also colored by protectionist impulses.
     
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  • #33
    wco81 said:
    I disagreed with his contention, pointed out that the DMA/DSA only targets US firms and one Chinese firm.
    Click to expand...

    It was initially believed to apply to one Berlin-based company (Zalando) and one Amsterdam-based firm (booking.com), as well.


    But the Spotify case is obviously still coloured by protectionist impulses, since the United States is apparently following suit (as predicted by almost everyone).
     
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  • #34
    analogika said:
    It was initially believed to apply to one Berlin-based company (Zalando) and one Amsterdam-based firm (booking.com), as well.
    Click to expand...

    I couldn't find anything more recent that this list from last September.

    digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu

    DMA designated Gatekeepers

    European Commission designated for the first time six gatekeepers - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft - under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). In total, 22 core platform services provided by those gatekeepers have been designated.
    digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu

    I don't see Zalando or booking.com on there. I don't know what Zalando is. Do they make €7.5 billion a year in annual turnover? Booking.com may or may not.

    analogika said:
    But the Spotify case is obviously still coloured by protectionist impulses, since the United States is apparently following suit (as predicted by almost everyone).
    Click to expand...

    Not following. Is there a case against Spotify in the US? Some podcasters hate what Spotify has done to their market, now most of them are struggling to find ad support for their shows so more and more of them are asking listeners to directly subscribe or putting up paywalls.
     
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  • #37
    analogika said:
    Zalando made 10.1 billion € revenue in 2023.

    Do you have an internet where you live? I can recommend it.
    Click to expand...
    If they're not among the gatekeepers as designated by the EU, why would I look them up?

    Get back to me when they have several EU companies as gatekeepers, because my contention was that the DMA/DSA primarily targets non-EU companies.

    As of right now, that is the case. Let's see if that ever changes.


    So the EU just fined Apple €1.84 billion for the music streaming issue.

    I've searched and searched and as far as I can tell, the official fines imposed by the EU on EU car manufacturers was less than €1 billion.

    The EU has fined Volkswagen and BMW €875m (£750m) after finding that the German carmakers colluded with another rival, the Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler, to delay emissions-cleaning technology.

    The European Commission said that the carmakers had “breached EU antitrust rules by colluding on technical development in the area of nitrogen oxide cleaning”.


    Volkswagen, the world’s largest manufacturer of cars, will pay €502m, a reduction of more than half the original fine because it cooperated with the investigation. BMW will pay €372m, far lower than the provision for well over €1bn that it had initially made. Daimler escaped without a fine because it had revealed the cartel to the commission.

    The fines are the latest blow to the German car industry in relation to diesel pollution, after the “Dieselgate” cheating scandal, in which Volkswagen and Daimler were found to have added software, known as defeat devices, that during testing deliberately reduced emissions during testing of nitrogen oxides harmful to human health. Volkswagen and Daimler have both paid out billions of euros in fines and compensation.
    Click to expand...
    www.theguardian.com

    EU fines VW and BMW £750m for colluding with Daimler on fumes

    Commission imposes £750m fine for breaching antitrust rules by delaying cleaner emissions technology
    www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

    VW has paid out tens of billions in fines and compensation, such as buybacks of vehicles or $2.7 billion to set up Electrify America. But this is what they've had to pay globally, to regulators and VW owners worldwide, not speficially fines paid to the EU.

    I couldn't find any other figure that the EU itself imposed on EU car manufacturers than the €875 million figure. Maybe the emissions scandal will lead to more fines from the EU itself.

    But it's interesting, it's less than half the fine which the EU imposed on Apple. For something much much worse than charging Spotify higher fees on the App Store, which may or may not have caused EU consumers to pay more for music streaming than they otherwise would have.

    Let's see colluding to cause cars to emit more pollutants, causing more deaths and health problems or potentially making consumers pay more for music streaming.

    Which is the greater offense and which should bear a higher fine from the regulating authority, in this case the EU?

    Oh but EU car manufacturers employ so many more EU employees ...
     
    analogika

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  • #38
    wco81 said:
    If they're not among the gatekeepers as designated by the EU, why would I look them up?
    Click to expand...

    Because you took more time to write about them after you'd misread my comment than it would have taken to look them up?

    wco81 said:
    Get back to me when they have several EU companies as gatekeepers, because my contention was that the DMA/DSA primarily targets non-EU companies.
    Click to expand...

    You tend to argue that it targets exclusively non-EU companies, as protectionist policy.

    I merely pointed out that it actually initially looked like it would encompass two rather large EU companies, as well. That they ended up not being affected was apparently not protectionist design — or they wouldn't have looked to be targets at the beginning, either, eh? The issue passed them by — for now — just like it did iMessage.
     
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