BRUSSELS – Large tech companies, including Google parent Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc., face a series of proposed European regulations to curb their alleged anti-competitive behavior, forcing them to pay more taxes and forcing them to take more responsibility for illegal content on their platforms, said a senior European Union official.
Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust and digital policy tsar, first detailed a comprehensive plan for how he intends to control the US tech giants.The goal is to clearly outline new legal boundaries for tech companies, rather than only apply existing laws covering fields such as antitrust regulation.
“It is a complete complex of things. It is not done with a single law,” Vestager said in an interview with a small group of reporters. Ms Vestager, who in her previous tenure as European Competition Commissioner imposed record fines on Google and ordered Apple Inc. to pay Ireland $ 14.5 billion in allegedly unpaid taxes, was promoted to Vice-President of the European Commission last year. , executive of the EU arm, in charge of competition and new legislation for the digital sector.
“After the first term and the first specific competition cases, what I have seen very clearly is that we need a rigorous application of competition law, but we also need regulation,” he said.
Tech companies have said they want to work with the commission to draft the new laws, but several have expressed concern about the elements of the proposals. Representatives of Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon either asked about the commission’s new approach, or did not respond, declined to comment, or referred to previous responses to individual EU proposals.
Ms Vestager’s regulatory plans would keep the EU at the forefront of a movement to more tightly regulate tech companies, although other parts of the world are increasingly joining the debate. In 2018, the EU put into effect a data protection regime known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which was imitated in several other jurisdictions and inspired California’s data protection measures that went into effect in January. . Greater European regulation in the digital sector is likely to have an impact beyond the continent, with other jurisdictions following suit. The US Department of Justice proposed last month to reverse rules that limit companies’ liability for what people post on their platforms, and the UK antitrust authority has proposed creating a special antitrust unit focused on Digital markets, which could have powers that could include asking large companies to share data with smaller ones.
They occur when most European governments that have implemented coronavirus contact tracking applications are using Google and Apple’s new software framework to do so, including Germany and Italy. France is the last major holdout, and its application has suffered from a low adoption rate.
In May, the EU published guidelines for governments and technology companies on how to balance privacy with the need to collect sensitive health data. Ms Vestager has endorsed the type of system used by Apple and Google, in part because she leaves most user data on the phone, a rare case of American companies that get high marks from European privacy advocates.
“If he is a volunteer but people don’t trust him and he doesn’t sign up, it doesn’t work,” Vestager told The Wall Street Journal in an interview in April.
Last week, Ms. Vestager explained three separate new laws that are likely to be introduced later this year, including the responsibility of a boarding platform for its content. Several EU governments and the European Parliament have advocated such measures, so the proposals are likely to gain broad support in principle and become law by the end of next year.
The current EU e-commerce rules date back to 2000, “when no one could have foreseen the situation we are in today, that platforms would not be just channels, but entire ecosystems where much of what is underway is monetized by platform itself, “he said.
He said the EU will not require that the platforms be “responsible for each and every fake publication or bag that is put up for sale,” but rather create redress mechanisms that businesses and individuals can turn to when taken. your posts and announcements. down.
Another condition to be imposed would require platforms to establish themselves as commercial entities in Europe, Vestager said, “so that everyone is governed by this set of rules, and that applies to platforms wherever they come from on this planet.”
Decades-old book laws in the US and Europe have protected tech companies from responsibility for what their users do on their platforms. Policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic have proposed to reverse those protections, blaming technology platforms for allowing the spread of misleading electoral information, coronavirus-related hoaxes and other malicious messages.
The commission launched a month-long public consultation in June on proposed changes to the existing Digital Services Act, which is part of the new legislative package. Apple responded by defending the current regime. “The limited liability regime has helped offer choice and innovation,” said the company’s response. Apple also called for the new rules to be flexible enough for a variety of service providers. “What makes sense for public-facing content sharing platforms may not be appropriate or technically feasible for the services used to facilitate private communications or storage.” said.
Other legislation would list prohibited practices. Its goal is to prevent platforms from taking advantage of its dominance to override its smaller rivals, and is inspired by the three EU antitrust cases against Google that brought fines totaling more than $ 9 billion.
Separately, Ms Vestager said in the interview that she is seeking greater investigative powers that allow her to order all companies in a certain sector to change their behavior so that they do not monopolize a particular market. This “would prevent new gatekeepers from emerging, so we can still have the benefit of competition in the market,” he said.
In tax matters, the EU is considering establishing its own digital tax now that the Trump administration and European countries, including France, have come to a standstill in international talks on the matter. The European Commission, like several European countries, has said over the past year that if international talks fail later this year, the bloc will come up with its own digital tax proposals.
The EU has proposed establishing a dialogue channel dedicated to technology and trade with the United States to solve these problems. “We will do what we can to make that happen,” he said.
Ms Vestager said that a digital tax is justified by justice. “Many companies have to work very hard to make a profit, and from that profit to later pay taxes,” he said. “They shouldn’t meet capital competitors, skilled employees, and customers who don’t contribute to society. That has nothing to do with where you come from, it has to do with doing business the same way.”
In a presentation to the commission last week, Google warned against adopting strict rules prohibiting it from promoting its own services, for which it has already been fined by the EU. The company said the practice could help users, citing as an example its practice of putting its own maps at the top of some Google searches.
Google is the subject of preliminary antitrust investigations in several of its non-search services, and the commission has sent new requests for documents in recent months, Vestager said.
Facebook has said the goal of the proposal may not be to address an “enforcement gap”, but rather “to reduce the legal and evidentiary standard of intervention” to allow the commission to act and impose remedies.
Tech lobbyists are also pressing for caution before enacting new rules. “The commission must carefully weigh the evidence for potential new theories of harm against the potential costs of top-down intervention,” said Kayvan Hazemi-Jebelli, competition and regulatory adviser for the Association of the Computer and Communications Industry, a lobby group representing companies that include Amazon. , Facebook and Google.
Write to Valentina Pop at [email protected] and Sam Schechner at [email protected]
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