The Council of the European Union is ready to start interinstitutional negotiations on the unfair practices in platform-to-business (P2B) relations draft regulation. Despite their divisions, the European Ministers of Competitiveness adopted their general approach at their meeting on Thursday 29 November in Brussels, after the approval of the Permanent Representatives on 16 November (see EUROPE 12143).
The Council's general approach takes up the flexible approach advocated by the European Commission on this proposal, which requires platform intermediaries and search engines to be transparent about ranking parameters and to strengthen the possibilities for an injured company to seek redress. The main change concerns the addition of an Article 12a which requires Member States to adopt and implement a system of “effective, proportionate and dissuasive” sanctions. The text also introduces a two-step approach on Article 4, on suspension and termination: it requires platforms to state their reasons “before or at the time” of suspending content and to do so “30 days before” termination.
Flexible or hard approach
Sweden, Croatia and Bulgaria welcomed this general approach with enthusiasm. For the rest, however, the ministerial debate revealed a certain division between those States that favoured a 'light' approach and those that did not. In particular, supporters of a flexible approach have co-signed a joint statement denouncing the new sanctions regime (Article 12a) and calling for the term 'sanction' to be replaced by 'measure'. This group is composed of Finland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, Poland and the United Kingdom. “The freedom to regulate should be respected to the maximum, with regulatory intervention only when necessary", the Finnish delegation said.
On the other hand, France, Italy, Germany and Spain defended a 'more ambitious' approach, while Belgium welcomed the new sanction regime. In particular, France called for not excluding intermediation services or programmatic advertising service platforms; for going beyond a simple obligation of transparency on the issue of data access or tariff parity clauses; and for providing for the rule of non-discrimination in relation to the platforms' own service offers from the scope of application.
It should also be noted that Malta and Luxembourg have both called for the issue of platforms to be addressed from a competitive perspective in order to avoid monopoly or oligopoly situations.
The focus is now on the European Parliament, which is due to adopt its position in the Internal Market Committee on 6 December. Negotiations can begin immediately afterwards, with a first meeting on 12 December and a second one the following week.
See the text of the general approach on page: https://bit.ly/2DScHct and the joint declaration of the seven countries: https://bit.ly/2FY9tpE. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)