The NGO Corporate Europe Observatory published a report on Tuesday 18 January in which it denounces the intensive lobbying operations carried out by the technology giants in the context of the discussions in the European Parliament on the Digital Services Act (DSA) (see EUROPE 12853/3).
Some 613 meetings were recorded by MEPs, including 23 with Google, 16 with Facebook, 15 with Amazon and 12 with Microsoft. This represents a total of “1.7 meetings per day without any breaks”, the observatory summarises.
Sources in the European Parliament indicated that the issue of online advertising, targeting and tracking, had “quickly” become the biggest pressure point from the lobbies.
“This ultimately helped to alleviate the progressive pressure for a ban. Despite a cross-party consensus in the EU on the need to curb Big Tech , huge corporate lobbying budgets (...) still impact on EU policy and limit the biggest challenges to its economic model”, said Margarida Silva, researcher at the Corporate Europe Observatory.
See the report: https://bit.ly/33Lxrkq (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)