New standoff between the EU and American digital companies.
The European Commission launched proceedings on Monday against Apple, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook, Instagram) for alleged infringements of European competition rules, a first under the new Digital Markets Regulation (DMA).
Brussels has been in dialogue for months with the three American Internet giants about their plan to comply with the rules that came into force at the beginning of March.
After years of running in vain behind their abuse of a dominant position, due to insufficiently dissuasive legislation, the European executive hopes to have equipped itself with the DMA with a sufficiently powerful weapon to make them bend.
The new regulation provides for fines of up to 20% of global turnover in the event of serious and repeated infringement (compared to 10% until now).
Several open investigations
The Commission is thus opening an investigation against Alphabet, suspected of having exploited the quasi-monopoly of its Google search engine to favor, thanks to better referencing, its own price comparison services to the detriment of competitors in hotel searches. , plane tickets or other consumer goods sold online.
Google was already fined 2.4 billion euros in 2017 for this reason.
Read alsoPrice, cybersecurity, competition… what the DMA regulation will change for downloading apps
Alphabet and Apple are also being targeted for restrictions in their Google Play and App Store application stores.
According to the Commission, both groups “limit the ability of developers to freely communicate and promote their offerings and to enter into contracts directly” with end users, “including by imposing various fees.”
Meta, a social media giant, is being targeted for breach of the rule which requires it to request user consent in order to be able to combine personal data from its different services for advertising profiling purposes.
“We are not convinced”
The European executive hopes to conclude these procedures within a maximum period of 12 months.
“We can already see changes in the market.
But we are not convinced that the solutions proposed by Alphabet, Apple and Meta meet their obligations,” declared European Digital Commissioner Thierry Breton.
On Thursday, the American government also took Apple to court for monopolistic practices due to the constraints set by the Californian group on application developers.
Brussels has opened another procedure against Apple for an alleged violation of the obligation to offer users a way to easily uninstall default applications on the iOS operating system which equips its famous iPhones.
Following the Commission's decision, the tech lobby denounced the "rush" on the part of the EU.