Digital Markets Act: Short-term developments in digital markets
In the coming months, digital markets will undergo a tremendously important regulatory change, insofar as several companies identified as particularly dominant in these markets will be obliged to comply with the important obligations imposed on them, as of 6 March 2024, by Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 on Digital Markets.
Specifically, six companies have been designated, to date, as gatekeepers by the European Commission: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft, owners of digital platforms such as Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, App Store, IOS, Android, Whatsapp, Messenger or TikTok, among others.
Some of these obligations imposed by the European Commission on gatekeepers include the following:
- They must apply fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory conditions for access to their software application shops, search engines, online shops and social networking services.
- They should refrain from including parity clauses to the detriment of professional users.
- They shall refrain from preventing professional users from promoting offers to end-users and concluding contracts with them through any other distribution channel or platform.
- They should refrain from treating the gatekeeper's own services and products more favourably than similar products of third parties (in terms of ranking, indexing or crawling, for example).
- They should allow companies to access the data and information generated by their services on gatekeepers' platforms,
- They should refrain from using data that is not publicly generated or provided by professional users in the context of the use of the platform services, etc.
- They shall effectively allow and enable the installation and effective use of third party software applications or app shops that use or interoperate with their operating systems.
- They shall refrain from requiring end-users to use ancillary services such as identification services, technical services, browser engines or gatekeeper web payment services that enable the provision of payment services. In the case of professional users, the gatekeeper may not require them to use, offer or interoperate with such services.
- They shall ensure price transparency in advertising intermediation vis-à-vis advertisers and publishers.
- They shall not require users to subscribe to or register with any core platform service as a condition of using, accessing, registering with or subscribing to any of the gatekeeper's core platform services.
- They shall refrain from introducing disproportionate or unenforceable conditions for termination of their service contracts.
- They should also refrain from preventing users from uninstalling any software or applications that have been pre-installed by the gatekeeper, etc.
The European Commission will be in charge of supervising compliance with these obligations, with the support of the National Commission for Markets and Competition and the Spanish Data Protection Agency in our country.
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