The draft opinion prepared by MEP Francis Zammit Dimech (EPP, Malta) on the draft regulation on business platforms (P2B) seems to have the support of the European Parliament's committee on legal affairs.
Only MEP Julia Reda (Greens/EFA, German) and the Commission took the floor during the discussion on Thursday 11 October. The deadline for tabling amendments is 24 October.
As a reminder, on 26 April the European Commission presented a draft regulation requiring digital platform intermediaries and search engines to be transparent about classification parameters and their conditions of use and suggesting that the possibilities of redress for an aggrieved company should be strengthened (see EUROPE 12010).
The committee responsible is the internal market committee, but the committee on legal affairs is also implicated (Rule 54 of the European Parliament's Rules of Procedure).
In his report, Francis Zammit Dimech reduces the transparency obligations associated with ranking, arguing that they should not apply to algorithms, "which must remain trade secrets". He proposed to distinguish a "transaction" from the "opening of a transaction", noting that simply searching for a product or service on a search engine can lead to – but does not necessarily lead to – the opening of a transaction. He also pleads for a 2-year review clause, instead of the 3 proposed by the Commission.
During the discussion, the European Commission warned against the rapporteur's amendment 32, which allows member states to maintain national provisions on all the provisions covered by the regulation rather than just the most favoured nation clause. For her part, Julia Reda welcomed the rapporteur's intention to include in the revision the possibility of extending the regulation to operating systems.
See the report on page: https://bit.ly/2OnBLhd. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)