EU’s Vestager: Tougher new rules for tech giants, more power to enforcers

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Tech giants will need to do much more to weed out harmful and illegal content while online gatekeepers will be bound by a list of dos and don'ts under new rules aimed at reining in their own power, Europe's antitrust chief has said.

European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager also proposed new abilities for enforcers to tackle market failures in electronic markets and to stop new ones from emerging markets.

Under the projected Digital Services Act, online platforms will need to check vendors' identities before they can use their services in a move aimed at countering illegal and dangerous content.

The tech companies will have to produce reports on their actions and inform users who pays for the advertisements that they see and why they have been targeted by certain adverts, Vestager said.

The second set of rules called the Digital Markets Act is targeted at online gatekeepers.

"That proposition will have two pillars," Vestager told a European Policy Center event.

"The first of those pillars will be a clear list of dos and don'ts for big digital gatekeepers, based on our experience with the sorts of behaviour that can stop markets working well."

Practices not allowed include pushing one's own services, known as unfair self-preferencing, making it difficult for users to switch platforms or to use more than one service.

Vestager said the second pillar of the Digital Markets Act was to set up a harmonised market investigation framework across the 27-country bloc.

"That might give us a harmonised set of principles that would allow us to explore certain structural problems in digital markets and, if necessary, we could take action to make these markets contestable and competitive," she said.

Vestager will announce the new draft principles on December the 2nd. She'll need to reconcile her proposition with people from EU countries and the European Parliament before it can become legislation.

The team at Platform Executive hope you have enjoyed this news article. Initial reporting via our official content partners at Thomson Reuters. Reporting by Foo Yun Chee. Editing by Robert Birsel.

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