Amazon, More US Big Tech Should Be Targeted by Draft Rules: EU Lawmaker

Draft rules aimed at reining in the power of Facebook, Alphabet unit Google, Amazon, and Apple should only target these US tech giants, a leading EU lawmaker said, signalling a tougher stand than EU antitrust regulators.

Proposed by European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager last year, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) could force US 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 EUR 6.5 billion (roughly Rs. 58,150 crores) in annual European turnover in the last three years or EUR 65 billion (roughly Rs. 5,81,590 crores) 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 US competitors.

That revenue threshold should be ratcheted up to EUR 10 billion (roughly Rs. 89,440 crores) and the market value to at least EUR 100 billion (roughly Rs. 8,94,380 crores), 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.

© Thomson Reuters 2021