The European Commission intends to strengthen by the end of the year its repressive arsenal against the hegemony of the digital giants, which could go as far as their exclusion from the common market, said Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton to the Financial Times .
Read also: The European Union relaunches the "Gafa tax"
The Gafa (acronym for Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple), are "
too big not to care,
" said the commissioner, according to whom the EU "
needs better supervision
" of these behemoths. like the reinforced regulation of banking activity after the 2008 crisis.
A code of good practice
The European Commission is due to unveil new legislation by the end of the year (the “
Digital Services Act
”), a priority for the European executive, in order to better monitor the way in which large platforms are expanding their activities, s 'attack disinformation or manage personal data.
It aims to better protect consumers and smaller competitors.
The scale of sanctions for platforms which, for example, force their users to use only their service, could go as far as requiring them to separate from some of their activities.
“
Platforms need to be more responsible and accountable, they need to become more transparent.
It is time to go beyond self-regulatory measures
, ”said Vera Jourova, responsible for values and transparency within the Commission, presenting at the beginning of September an assessment of the implementation of a code of best practices against disinformation, launched in 2018 and signed by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Mozilla and more recently TikTok.
