The EU is gearing to force big tech companies to share customer data with significantly smaller competitors. The Financial Times reported the story on Wednesday and cited an early draft of the ‘Digital Services Act’ regulations.
Amazon and Google shall not use data collected on the platform for their commercial activities unless they make it accessible for business users who are active in the same commercial activities. That statement is just one of the changes that the Act proposes.
The antitrust chief of the European Union, Margrethe Vestager, will most likely announce by the end of this year, new and strict rules under the Act that will increase media companies’ responsibility and liability for content published on their platform.
Antitrust in the limelight
The EU is not the only place where antitrust has become an issue. Not too long ago, Apple, Google, and Facebook were all summoned to testify about the activities. In recent times, most of the big tech companies have become frighteningly large and powerful.
Often, lax laws and what can only be described as arrogance have seen companies using consumer data for nefarious purposes or collecting sensitive personal data that they are not supposed to be collecting.
Fairness in competition
The EU draft suggests that the tech giants will be banned from receiving preferential treatment of their services on their sites and platforms. Typically, these companies build their ecosystem to become big enough to swallow smaller companies or drive them out of business—case in point, Amazon.com.
Companies should not be allowed to have their own applications pre-installed on hardware devices like phones and laptops or force other companies to exclusively pre-install the software.
The draft in its entirety is not yet out, but we will let you know when it will be.
Also read: Should Europe compete for technological world domination?
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