Will European tech regulation finally allow the minnows to thrive?
A good article in the Financial Times, “How Big Tech lost the antitrust battle with Europe”, provides an overview of the future legal landscape for technology companies in the European Union, and how the major technology companies have been unable, despite their powerful lobbying, to rein in regulation.
Two main packages, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA), are supposed to level the regulatory playing field, first to ensure fairer competition and facilitate the emergence of smaller competitors without them being eaten up or chased away by the big companies; and second, to regulate issues mainly related to privacy and data exploitation.
These could be the most important changes yet in the digital era, developed now we know about the side effects of the appearance of huge companies capable to monopolize entire areas of business, setting up platforms they wrote the rules for, or of creating business models based on the exploitation of user data that has led to widespread abuse of privacy in some cases. The fact that it is the European Union that is considering such far-reaching legislation, when it has historically been the most proactive territory in this regard and that has been copied in the United States and China, makes the issue even more important.
