After several hours of interinstitutional negotiations (‘trilogue’), negotiators from the EU Council and the European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on the Digital Markets Act (DMA) (see EUROPE 12913/20) shortly before 11pm on Thursday 24 March.
“Today’s agreement marks the beginning of a new era for technology regulation worldwide. The Digital Markets Act puts an end to the ever-increasing dominance of large technology companies”, said the rapporteur, Andreas Schwab (EPP, Germany).
The provisional agreement resulting from this fourth eight-hour trilogue provides for companies with a market value of up to €75 billion, an annual global turnover of €7.5 billion and a minimum of 45 million users per month to qualify as gatekeepers.
In addition, web browsers and virtual assistants have also been added to the list of core platform services in the scope of the DMA.
Thus, if the points to be settled were few before this last trilogue, they were of a “very political” nature, a source told EUROPE.
Among the other hot topics of the negotiations, the issue of interoperability of services was also discussed. As such, Mr Schwab explained, “small messaging services will be allowed to interconnect with WhatsApp or Messenger in the future. Consumers will then be able to write messages to each other through different services”.
In addition, the issue of targeted advertising was also discussed. In this respect, the rapporteur simply stated, “the online advertising market will become fairer”.
Issues relating to gatekeeper acquisitions and DMA governance were also addressed, as were provisions for ‘fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory’ (‘FRAND’) terms and conditions of access. On this point, the provisional agreement envisages extending these provisions to social networks and search engines.
The sanctions regime and systematic non-compliance were also discussed. In this area, the Parliament proposed, among other things, to reduce the number of offences required for the company to be covered by the provisions of the DMA from three to two and to double the duration of the period from five to ten years. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)