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.