The Digital Markets Regulation, which obliges the top six controllers of access to 22 core services on digital platforms such as TikTok or Facebook to comply with fair competition rules, comes into force this Thursday.
The six gatekeepers appointed in September 2023 to lead the community are Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft, and the legislation under consideration aims to ensure fair competition between digital platforms, regardless of their size, to offer consumers more options. and promoting new opportunities for small businesses.
The regulation sets new rules for ten specific core platform services such as search engines, online marketplaces, app stores, online advertising and messaging services, and gives new rights to European businesses and end users.
The Digital Markets Regulation aims to prevent access controllers from imposing unfair terms on companies and end users, and to ensure the open nature of important digital services.
The access controller criteria are met when the company has a strong economic position, has significant influence on the internal market and develops activities in several EU countries, has a strong intermediary position, that is, provides a link between a wide user base and a large number of companies and, in- third, has (or intends to maintain) an established and strong position in the market, considering that the position is stable if the company meets the two previous criteria in each of the last three financial years.