EU citizens live on an internet built and governed by foreign powers. Most EU people use American search engines, shop on American e-commerce sites, use American mobile phones, and scroll through American social media.
That fact has sparked growing alarm in the corridors of Brussels, as the EU tries to understand how exactly these companies are distorting the surrounding economy.Five years ago, Shoshana Zuboff’s book The age of surveillance capitalism As lawmakers prepare to enforce the flagship GDPR privacy law, they deftly conveyed much of their criticism of tech giants. Now, with the EU enacting another historic tech regulation, the Digital Markets Act, which companies must comply with from tomorrow, March 7, another commentator summed up the new mood in Brussels.
In his book “2023”, technofeudalismYanis Varoufakis believes that big American tech platforms have brought feudalism back to Europe. The former Greek finance minister sees little difference between a medieval serf working on land that does not belong to him and an Amazon seller, who must abide by the company’s strict rules while giving the company a cut of every sale.
The idea that a handful of big tech companies have conquered internet users into digital empires has permeated throughout Europe. technofeudalism Share shelf space with others Cloud Empire and digital empire, which make broadly similar arguments. For years, Europe’s would-be rivals to big tech companies, such as Sweden’s Spotify or Switzerland’s ProtonMail, have claimed that companies such as Google, Meta and Apple are using tactics such as pre-installing Gmail on new Android phones or Apple’s strict restrictions to Unfairly limiting their ability to reach potential users. App Store Rules. “Being a monopoly is not a problem,” said Sandra Wachter, professor of technology and regulation at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute. “If you start excluding other people from the market, that becomes a problem.”
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To solve this problem, Brussels politicians passed the Digital Markets Act in 2022. The bill seeks to rein in the largest tech companies, almost all of them American, which act as gatekeepers between consumers and other businesses. A sister statute, the Digital Services Act, which focuses more on freedom of expression, came into effect last month. Wachter said they follow a long legal tradition of trying to protect the public and the economy from state power wielded by governments or monarchs. “With the rise of the private sector and globalization, the power has just shifted,” she added. Tech platforms rule digital life like kings. DMA is part of keeping up.
The rules will change tomorrow for platforms deemed “gatekeepers” by the DMA – so far these include Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok parent ByteDance. The law essentially pries open “core services” that are the EU’s so-called “gatekeepers”. In the past, regulators have proposed curbing corporate giants by breaking them up. The motto for EU lawmakers is “Don’t break up big tech companies, let them open up.”
In theory, this means a huge change in the digital lives of EU residents. iPhone users will soon be able to download apps from places other than Apple’s App Store; Microsoft Windows will no longer have Microsoft-owned Bing as its default search tool; Meta-owned WhatsApp users will be able to chat with people on rival messaging apps Communication; Google and Amazon will have to adjust their search results to create more space for competitors. There will also be restrictions on how user data can be shared between a company’s different services. Fines for non-compliance can reach up to 20% of global sales revenue. The law also gives the EU the nuclear option to force technology companies to sell parts of their businesses.
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Most of the tech giants have expressed unusual warnings about the changes being asked of them this week. Google talks of “difficult trade-offs” that could mean its search results drive more traffic to hotels or flight aggregators. Apple claims that DMA compromises the security of its devices. Apple, Meta and TikTok have all launched legal challenges against the EU, saying the new rules unfairly target their services. The argument in favor of the status quo is that competition is actually booming—just look at TikTok, a tech company that launched over the past decade and is now designated as one of the so-called gatekeepers.
But TikTok is an exception. The DMA wants to make the emergence of new household names in the tech industry the norm; as EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager explained to Wired in 2022, “Driving innovation allows Small businesses can really succeed”. Many hope that some of the new businesses that will “succeed” will come from Europe. Almost every big tech service has a smaller, homegrown counterpart: from German search engine Ecosia to French messaging app Olvid and Polish Amazon alternative Allegro. Many hope these companies will benefit from the DMA, although there are widespread doubts about how effective the new rules will be in forcing the tech giants to make changes.