The investigation into alleged abuse of a dominant position by Google has been closed with commitments. Now it will be easier for users to transfer their data to other platforms present in the ecosystem of the American group
The Competition and Market Authority has closed the investigation into alleged abuse of a dominant position against the companies Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, Google Ireland Limited and Google Italy Srl (Google), accepting the proposed commitments.
The Alphabet/Google group holds a dominant position in various markets and is therefore able to acquire large quantities of data through the services provided (Gmail, Google Maps, Android). In 2022, it had revenues of $282.8 billion. The potentially abusive conduct implemented by Google consisted of obstacles to interoperability in sharing data with other platforms, in particular with the Weople APP, developed by Hoda to offer users alternative ways of exploiting data.
Ldata portability institute – governed, inter alia, by Article 20 of the GDPR – facilitates the circulation of data and therefore offers alternative operators the possibility of exerting competitive pressure on operators such as Google, which manage ecosystems based on the availability of potentially unlimited quantities of data, functional only to their business model. Furthermore, the right to portability, if accompanied by effective interoperability mechanisms, can offer users the possibility of obtaining the maximum economic potential from the use of personal data, also through alternative methods of exploitation to those practiced today by the dominant operator.
All in all, the Authority considered the commitments proposed by Google suitable to remove the competition concerns. In fact, the group presented a package of three commitments, two of which envisage supplementary solutions for Takeout – the service that Google makes available to end users for the backup of your data – to facilitate the export of data to third party operators. The third commitment offers the possibility to start testing, before the official release, a new solution – currently under development – which will allow the direct portability of data from service to service, for third-party operators authorized by an end user who does so. request, in relation to the data provided by the user himself or generated through his activity on the Google online search engine and the YouTube platform.
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According to the Authority, the commitments presented by Google guarantee an important automation of the procedure available for data export (Takeout). They also improve an interoperability mechanism that makes data available in the Google ecosystem accessible to third-party platforms. Users and third-party operators will be able to make use of this mechanism until the release of a direct portability solution from service to service, which, according to what Google itself has indicated, will take place in the first quarter of 2024. Furthermore, as a result of the commitments, the third-party operators concerned to Google data will be able to start testing the aforementioned direct portability solution with regard to Google Search and YouTube services at least six months in advance of its actual release.
“There is a principle“, he writes Diego Ciulli, Head of Government Affairs and Public Policy, Google Italy, “People must be free to use their data in the services they prefer. For this reason, for more than 10 years we have been offering the possibility of taking away and transferring data from over 70 different Google services. And we continue to invest in these tools so that they are easy to use and respectful of their privacy. This is why I am very pleased that today the Italian antitrust has accepted our commitments in this area.”