A meeting with “mixed” results: this is how one of our sources described the second trilogue negotiation session between the European Parliament and the Council on unfair practices in business-to-business platform relations (P2B), which took place on Monday 28 January and was reported at the meeting of Member States' EU ambassadors (Coreper) two days later.
This text – which obliges platform intermediaries and search engines to make the ranking parameters transparent, while strengthening the possibilities of recourse for a company that considers itself wronged – is very sensitive in nature.
During the trilogue of 28 January, many items on the agenda were referred on to a technical meeting due to a lack of agreement on a political level. The co-legislators were not able to agree on transparency requirements for classification, which Parliament would like to extend to all parameters, while the Council favours the main parameters (Article 5).
Differences persist in respect of transparency obligations in the event of differential treatment, which Parliament would like to extend to search engines, while the Council is in favour of keeping the original proposal and limiting this obligation to intermediation platforms only.
Negotiators also disagree on the issue of access to data (Article 7). Unlike the Member States, Parliament would indeed like search engines, like platforms, to be required to indicate in their general conditions how they use the data provided to them by user companies. It also wants these user companies to be able to receive anonymous and aggregated information on their rating and evaluation on the platform interface.
The other, less controversial agenda items have been provisionally validated. These include provisions on general conditions (Article 3(1)), with the exception of the reference, as requested by Parliament, to “fair and proportionate” clauses. The same applies to Article 4 on restriction, suspension and revocation, which provides that a platform must give its user at least 30 days' notice. The same goes for Article 5a, which sets out the information to be provided by the platform on ancillary goods and services.
It should be noted that the next negotiation meeting, initially announced for February 12, could ultimately take place the next day.
To read the last four-column table of the inter-institutional negotiations: https://bit.ly/2CYvlge (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)