Digital Markets ACT (DMA), intended to create a more level rules of play, causes significant and unintentional damage to European users and many of the small businesses it was intended to protect. This week we detailed these effects in our response to the Europe Commission’s consultation on this new law and gave our thoughts on how to improve it.
Unintended consequences
Consider the influence of DMA on Europe’s tourism industry. DMA requires Google search to stop displaying useful travel results that connect directly to airlines and hotel sites, and instead show links to mediating sites that charge for recording. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses and makes it more difficult for people to quickly find reliable, direct reservation information.
The most important parts of the European tourism industry have already seen free, direct booking traffic from the Google Search Plum by up to 30%. A recent study of the economic effect of DMA estimates that European companies across sectors could face revenue losses of up to DKK 114 billion. EUR.
Favors the few
We are still concerned that these changes in the search are the result of DMA prioritizing the commercial interests of a small set of intermediate places – which often shouts the highest in these debates – over most companies’ ability to sell directly to their customers.
In addition to searching, DMA makes it difficult to protect users from scams and malicious links on Android by forcing us to remove our legitimate security measures that protect users’ security and security. Unlike iOS, Android is open by design, which means users can download apps from other sources (known as “sideloading”). Plus, most devices come with multiple app stores pre-installed. This openness has benefited from innovation and choices throughout Europe, but is now threatened.
Competitiveness needs clarity
DMA’s biggest challenge remains: How do we increase innovation and deliver advanced products to Europe while navigating complex and untested new rules?
Regulatory burdens and uncertainty delay our launch of new products, such as our latest AI features, with up to a year after they are launched in the rest of the world. This delay harms European consumers and businesses that deserve access to the latest and best technology.
Time for a reset
We have proactively made many changes to our products to comply with DMA, including offering new opportunities such as data portability tools to European companies and developers. But we and other companies still face considerable uncertainty and unpredictability. This is aggravated by overlapping rules from national regulators and cases for national courts that are increasingly undermining DMA’s goal of creating harmonized, consistent rules across the EU.
We urge the Commission to ensure that future enforcement is user -driven, fact -based, consistent and clear. We should have a single -set focus on benefiting European companies and consumers for the benefit of taking advantage of high quality products and services. DMA compliance should improve the digital markets, not at the expense of security, integrity, quality or usability.