On March 24, the European Union reached a compromise deal on its long-awaited Digital Markets Act (DMA) proposal, aimed to prevent dominant online platforms from abusing their market power. The compromise follows extensive negotiations between the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament, and the European Commission, which originally proposed the regulation in December 2020. The final deal, which the Council and the Parliament will still have to formally agree to, prohibits gatekeeper platforms from combining and reusing consumer data across services, self-preferencing their own products and services, imposing unfair conditions on business users, or requiring app developers to use certain services in order to be listed in app stores, along with other obligations. The final Act also requires platforms to share more data and tools with advertisers and publishers. According to reports, last minute changes to the text also included a requirement for platforms to provide fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) conditions of access to business users, including news publishers, when it comes to search engines and social media sites, in addition to providing dispute settlement mechanisms for disagreements.The rules apply to platforms with an annual turnover of at least €7.5 billion within the EU or a market valuation of €75 billion that have at least 45 million monthly end users and 10,000 business users in the Union and that operate a core platform service in at least three member states. The Act also establishes fines of up to 10 percent of total worldwide turnover for violations, with repeated violators being fined more. Once the regulation has been formally approved, it will be published in the EU Official Journal. It will then enter into force 20 days later with the rules becoming applicable six months after that. Read more about the Digital Markets Act here.
Members of the News/Media Alliance staff have contributed to this post.
