Negotiators from the European Parliament and the European Council have provisionally agreed the text of a Digital Market Act (DMA) that will obligate “gatekeeper” technology companies such as Apple and Google to “allow app developers fair access to the supplementary functionalities of smartphones (eg NFC chip)”.
The DMA will also prevent such companies requiring “app developers to use certain services (eg payment systems or identity providers) in order to be listed in app stores”, the European Council says in its summary of the proposed legislation[1].
In addition, the text of the DMA agreed by negotiators will require gatekeeper companies to:
- Ensure that users have the right to unsubscribe from core platform services under similar conditions to subscription
- For the most important software (eg web browsers), not require this software by default upon installation of the operating system
- Ensure the interoperability of their instant messaging services’ basic functionalities
- Give sellers access to their marketing or advertising performance data on the platform
- Inform the European Commission of their acquisitions and mergers.
It also states that such companies will no longer be able to:
- Rank their own products or services higher than those of others (self-preferencing)
- Reuse private data collected during a service for the purposes of another service
- Establish unfair conditions for business users
- Pre-install certain software applications.
The DMA defines a gatekeeper company as a platform that has had either “an annual turnover of at least €7.5bn (US$8.3bn) within the European Union in the past three years or have a market valuation of at least €75bn (US$83bn), and secondly it must have at least 45 million monthly end users and at least 10,000 business users established in the EU”.
Gatekeeper companies
