By Foo Yun Chee
BRUSSELS, April 28 (Reuters) – The European Union plans to turn the focus of its landmark rules curbing the power of Big Tech to cloud and artificial intelligence services, aiming to promote fairer competition after seeing positive results in other digital areas, EU regulators said.
The EU Commission’s Digital Markets Act currently targets Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Booking.com, ByteDance, Meta Platforms and Microsoft, imposing obligations on so-called “gatekeepers” to prevent them from abusing their market dominance.
The Commission said the DMA, which became applicable in May 2023, has improved conditions for businesses and users.
The comments were in a report published on Tuesday, with regulators saying the DMA has allowed users to transfer their data more easily when switching to rival services and devices, while allowing device makers greater interoperability with Big Tech operating systems.
“The DMA was designed to be future-proof and adapt to emerging challenges, for example in AI and cloud,” European Union antitrust chief Teresa Ribera said in a statement.
AIMING TO MAKE AI, CLOUD SERVICES FAIRER
The Commission, which acts as the EU competition enforcer, said the aim now was to make cloud services and AI “fairer and more contestable”. It will examine whether certain AI services should be designated as virtual assistant core platform services.
Regulators are now investigating whether Amazon and Microsoft should be labelled gatekeepers for their cloud computing services under the DMA and also whether the legislation can effectively tackle anticompetitive practices in this sector.
Apple criticised the report, saying it failed to take into account the DMA’s impact on user privacy, security and innovation.
It said the risks to EU users include more exposure to harmful content via alternative distribution, disruption to the seamless experience, sharing of their highly sensitive information with untrusted third parties, and delays in receiving the latest features and technologies available everywhere else.
The Commission said it would not push Big Tech to make their social networks work with each other despite calls by some companies but will continue to monitor the services.
“There is no clear demand for interoperability between designated social networks,” the EU competition enforcer said.
It said it had no plans to change the criteria used to designate companies as DMA gatekeepers nor the list of dos and don’ts for the companies, saying the existing framework was still fit for purpose.
Pan-European consumer lobbying organisation BEUC urged the Commission to beef up its enforcement especially in new digital areas.
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
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