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New Competition Law: Altmaier wants to curb the power of tech companies

2019-10-07T09:23:25.339Z


Minister of Economic Affairs Altmaier tightened after SPIEGEL information competition rules: The Cartel Office should Google and Co. prohibit the purchase of smaller companies, if they get too much power over user data.



Googled the fast way to the restaurant, ordered the speakers from Amazon, or chatted on Facebook about the purchase of a new sofa - in all these everyday things, the modern man leaves countless data on the big digital platforms, without him much notice. But for the predominantly American corporations, possessing this information means money and power that they can exploit - for the destruction of old chains and the defense of new, potential competitors.

Federal Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier (CDU) is now trying to stop this hitherto almost unbridled pursuit. He will present the amendment to the Law against Restraints of Competition this week. This includes a whole series of new regulations that govern the handling of customer and user data, but also make it more difficult to buy companies in the Internet sector. In return, the Minister of Economic Affairs facilitates the acquisition of small and medium-sized companies by raising the threshold for the Bundeskartellamt's examination.

With the amendment to the law, Altmaier would also like to sharpen his economic policy profile in the Federal Government. "The social market economy protects competition and so do consumers," he told SPIEGEL. "To ensure that this always works smoothly in the digital world, we want to modernize our competition law." It has seen how rapidly markets are changing in the platform economy and how market concentration is increasing, says Altmaier: "Now we are tightening the rules of the game for dominant platforms and improving the market and data access of competitors."

Users should be able to take their own data

At the heart of the amendment, which the Federal Cabinet will deal with on Wednesday, is dealing with data, the most important asset of the digital economy. Because platforms such as Google or Amazon have been largely unregulated so far, they have managed to generate large amounts of data about their users' behavior. They can commercialize this treasure: in tailor-made offers for the users, but also for advertisements that present Facebook, YouTube or Google on their websites.

Stephane De Sakutin / AFP

Peter Altmaier: "The social market economy protects competition and so does the consumer"

Users should therefore be able to access their own data and take it with them if they want to switch to other platforms, such as new providers. The Bundeskartellamt can also establish a "cross-market" position of a company by measuring "access to competitive data" by the group. The Authority may then "prohibit that undertaking from establishing or increasing barriers to entry or otherwise hindering other undertakings" by exploiting the competitive data collected from the market opposite in a dominated market, from entering another market. So it says in the novel, which is the SPIEGEL.

The competition guardians have been powerless here so far. The possession of data was not a criterion by which they could determine the market power of a company. Instead, they had to focus solely on sales and market share in a particular market.

Whistleblowers should be bettered

Whether the power of the big Internet companies can actually be contained by the new instruments also depends on how great the support of the policy is to protect small, German startups from the desires of the big platforms. At the European level, the introduction of a digital tax for large IT companies, which are registering their profits in tax havens and thus avoiding billions in payments, is currently being discussed. France is hesitant for this, the German Federal Government.

In recent years, the EU Commission has fined Google and other platforms for heavy fines if it has evidence that companies are abusing their market power. Minister of Economics Altmaier wants to ensure this at least on the nationally possible way and hopes by the protection of competition law and more innovation from German startups and smaller IT companies.

The amendment also contains a passage intended to strengthen the legal status of whistleblowers. Altmaier's officials seem to know that they need informers from the inner workings of the big Internet corporations. Such tipsters can help the antitrust authorities to provide the difficult evidence for the abuse of market power.

Source: spiegel

All business articles on 2019-10-07

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