The Parliamentary Industry Committee is continuing its work on the legislative proposal on platform-enterprise relations ('P2B').
While work is progressing well, in the opinion of the rapporteur, Christel Schaldemose (S&D, Denmark), on Monday 5 November, several issues - such as whether or not operating systems should be included in the scope of the regulation - remain open.
As a reminder, the proposed Regulation requires platform intermediaries and search engines to be transparent about ranking parameters and their conditions of use (including to terminate referencing) and to strengthen the possibilities of redress for an aggrieved company. At this stage, neither the European Parliament nor the Council has adopted its position on this text. In the Committee on the Internal Market (IMCO), responsible for the fund, 740 amendments were tabled to the draft report drafted by Christel Schaldemose.
During the examination of the amendments, which took place in the IMCO committee on 5 November, MEPs were extremely divided on the EPP group's willingness to include operating systems within the scope of the regulation. According to Philippe Juvin (EPP, France), without such an amendment, "one could imagine that intermediation service providers could circumvent the regulation by changing not their terms and conditions, but their operating system in a non-transparent way". The ECR and ALDE groups were particularly reluctant to accept this request, while Julia Reda, for the Greens/EFA Group, and Christel Schaldemose, for the S&D Group, showed more flexibility. Both MEPs suggested that their group might perhaps agree to include some operating systems and Julia Reda also raised the idea of including this provision in a review clause.
More broadly, the ECR and ALDE were the two most critical groups during the round table. ALDE said it preferred the original proposal to amendments tabled by MEPs. "This text should not be made into a Christmas tree", said Jasenko Selimovic (ALDE, Sweden). Daniel Dalton, on behalf of the ECR, issued a long list of criticisms, opposing in particular the principle of mandatory mediation (Articles 10 and 11) or the prohibition of the parity clause (Article 8).
The vote in the IMCO Committee is scheduled for 6 December. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)