New EU rules aim to make online markets fairer

European legislators have taken Thursday, the United States decided to launch new rules to combat unfair practices that stifle the competition of online platforms and applications stores. The rules are designed to limit the power of digital platforms by promoting fairness and transparency between platforms and companies that sell or market through them. They are aimed at search engines, e-commerce markets like Amazon Marketplace and eBay, at app stores such as Google Play and Apple's App Store, at social networking sites that work with companies such as Facebook pages and artist Instagram accounts, as well as with price comparison tools such as Skyscanner and Kayak.

Critics are skeptical. They say that the rules may have been drafted to limit the anti-competitive practices of the major technologies, but that they are formulated in such a way as to allow companies deemed to have abused their dominant position in the market.

The rules would oblige Internet companies to open their black boxes to reveal if and how they gave preferential treatment to their own products, how research rankings are determined, to be more transparent with companies regarding rules that affect their ability to sell via the platform, and set up internal services to deal with suppliers' complaints about unfair activities. They would create a European observatory of the online platform economy to monitor competition and related trends.

"These rules do not go to the heart of the matter," said Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, which advocates strict enforcement of antitrust rules against major technology platforms. "The heart of the problem is that Google, Facebook and Amazon are manipulating the interactions between people who sell objects and those who buy objects and manipulate it for their own benefit."

Lynn said the rules lacked the regulatory power to put an end to these manipulative practices and focused almost exclusively on promoting transparency, in the hope that companies would succeed in stopping the flagrant practices. But he says that these approaches have generally failed, starting with the regulations for the railroad companies of the 1860s. "You will not make the algorithms transparent," he says, adding that this approach suggests that European regulators "are either naive or they are in the bag".

The regulation was first proposed in April; they were finalized last week after multiple discussions between the European Parliament, the EU Council and the European Commission, and approved Thursday by Parliament's Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection.

During a committee meeting on Wednesday, Christel Schaldemose, a Danish member of the European Parliament and defender of the rules, said members of parliament wanted the rules to insist on fair competition and include implementing measures. specific. But she said that the European Council – representing the leaders of the Member States – wanted to focus on transparency. She said parliamentarians were in agreement "because there were elements regarding equity – not in the way we wanted, but it was enough."

In the end, Schaldemose said the legislators wanted something to be written down quickly in the books. "We could not wait a year, two or three years before making online platforms more transparent and much more equitable," she said. "It's a huge, ever-growing market that we need to regulate to make business practices fair across platforms and businesses."

According to Lynn, there is only one proven way to prevent companies from behaving in an unfair way: to prohibit practices such as discriminatory pricing, data usage policies, sharing of information and information. other forms of preferential treatment. He pointed out that the recently adopted Indian e-commerce regulation was a more effective way to combat unfair practices of online platforms.

Although the rules have been approved by the Council, the Parliament and the Commission, they still need to be approved by Parliament as a whole and by the EU Council of Ministers, which is expected to happen in the future. 39, here april. This is the first piece of EU legislation concerning the relationship between platforms and companies.

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