Proposed by European Competition Commissioner Margrethe
Vestager last year, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) could force U.S. tech giants
to change their lucrative business models and ensure a level playing field for
smaller rivals.
The DMA defines online gatekeepers as companies with more
than 6.5 billion euros ($8 billion) in annual European turnover in the last
three years or 65 billion euros in market value in the last financial year, and
which provide a core platform service in at least three EU countries.
Such criteria could catch big EU and Asian tech companies in
addition to the U.S. competitors.
That revenue threshold should be ratcheted up to 10 billion
euros and the market value to at least 100 billion, European Parliament
lawmaker Andreas Schwab, which is leading the file for the EU body, said in a
report.
"The DMA should be clearly targeted to those platforms
that play an unquestionable role as gatekeepers due to their size and their
impact on the internal market," he wrote in his report.
"To this end, it is appropriate to increase the
quantitative thresholds and to add ... that they are providers of not only one
but, at least, two core platform services," Schwab said.
The EU competition enforcer should be able to designate in a
month which gatekeepers should be subject to the rules instead of its proposed
three-month period, he said.
Schwab also proposed beefing up a list of don'ts set out by
the Commission, among them a halt to tech giants to favouring their own
services on their platforms or harvesting data from their platforms to compete
with their business users.
Parliament, which also has two other committees looking into
the draft rules, aims to come up with a common position by the end of this year
and start negotiations with EU countries next year.
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