Since the pandemic started last year, European citizens have had to radically realign their lives to the new reality. For the most part, this has meant rapidly migrating our personal and professional lives online. With this comes a broad range of policy measures aimed at reinforcing Europe’s connectivity and heightening cybersecurity standards across 2021.
The pandemic also resulted in vastly accelerated profits for many of the tech giants, highlighting their dominance across online markets and provoking concern among competition regulators in Brussels.
This, alongside a renewed commitment to further harmonizing rules for online services, contributed to the conception and presentation of the EU’s landmark Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act ahead of the Christmas break.
An EU member state review
– Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice President for Digital, European Commission.
Story of the week: Online platform giants will be forced to abide by a broad range of obligations as part of ambitious new plans laid out by the European Commission in its Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) on Tuesday.
Under a new set of obligations as part of the Digital Markets Act rules, platforms will be banned from using data gathered on their core service to offer other services in competition with rivals and there will be prohibitions on certain self-preferencing activities.
“We are looking into legal options to resolve this issue.”
– ECR MEP Angel Dzhambazki, who this week found himself at the centre of an Indian disinformation scandal in Brussels.
Story of the week: Researchers have unearthed a widespread, coordinated, and manipulative 15-year-long Indian disinformation operation in Brussels, with the creation of fake media, the revival of defunct think-tanks, and even the fraudulent impersonation of dead people.
Also this week: The latest on the Digital Services Act, MEPs concerned about copyright, auditors probe EU’s 5G goals, France DPA Vs Google, Schrems on US privacy hearing, Scholz on Facebook’s cryptocurrency, Frontex’s biometric tech, Vienna: EU’s spy capital, Romania to host EU cyber centre, EU Algorithm ranking guidelines, Zuboff on Google-Fitbit, German competition crackdown on Facebook, Amazon in the Nordics, and much, much more…
Bucharest was selected by EU governments on Wednesday (9 December) to host the EU’s new cyber-centre, beating six other candidate cities. It will be the first EU agency based in Romania.
The European Cybersecurity Industrial, Technology and Research Competence Centre (ECCC) will be based in the Romanian capital following a decision taken late Wednesday.
In 2018, the European Commission presented a regulation establishing the centre, which will receive funding from both the Digital Europe and Horizon Europe programs as part of the next EU long-term budget.
The objective of the centre, which would operate alongside a network of national competence hubs, is to centralise the European cybersecurity technological and industrial ecosystem and pool resources in the field, to bolster the bloc’s resilience against cybersecurity threats.