While the European Union and the United States in Brussels were moving in agreement on the war in Ukraine, a few meters away the Council and the European Parliament last night approved a large and very tough set of rules that from next year will limit very much the power of those Silicon Valley companies that we usually call Big tech, given the size they have reached in a few years: with this expression we refer to Apple, Alphabet (i.e. Google), Meta (i.e. Facebook), Amazon, Microsoft , but also to the Chinese Bytedance which controls TikTok.
The legislative instrument on which an agreement was found after less than a year of negotiations (very short times) is called Digital Market Act, DMA, three letters which according to the European Commissioner Thierry Breton they mean that from today no company in the digital world can be considered too big not to be responsible for what its services mean for users. In practice, Google and Apple will also have to open their app stores to competitors, Amazon will not be able to use its customers’ data to launch other products; and when in a month and also the Digital Service Act passes, the platforms will be held responsible for the content they host and therefore will have to moderate it much more actively. In fact, Big Tech from 2023 will start to be a little less Big. Four years after having imposed a new concept of privacy with the GDPR, the European Union once again intervenes on the digital sector to redesign its rules in defense of users. It is too early to say whether the DMA and the next DSA will be able to give us a better Internet or if they will only create unnecessary problems. What we can already say with certainty today is that the Internet was invented in the United States, and then it was the Silicon Valley startups that built the services we use every day, but now it is in Europe that the rules they try are established to eliminate bullying, abuse and dominant positions.