DSA/DMA Myths – What is the EU digital regulation really about?

“The Internet cannot remain a 'Wild West': we need clear and transparent rules, a predictable environment and balanced rights and obligations. Everything that is allowed offline should be authorised online; and everything that is forbidden offline should be banned online.”

To achieve this for Europe, we have proposed two legislative initiatives: the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The DSA and the DMA are Europe’s response to the societal call to reorganise the digital space in the face of increasing influence of online platforms – and especially of the large ones – on our economy, society and even democracy.

The call is the same all over the world, across continents: it is not acceptable anymore that online intermediaries claim no responsibility for the content they host nor that a few giant digital companies hold, uncontrolled, the power over digital markets – including the keys to the European single market for millions of users and companies.

Since we adopted our proposals, alongside legitimate debates and requests of clarifications and improvements, a number of incorrect claims started to spread.

Let's start looking at some of these claims, before they become real myths.

DMA Myth #1: “Digital services, such as digital maps, will never be the same after the DMA”

Let’s be clear and deconstruct this first myth.

The DMA will never prevent any innovative technological company to develop and introduce new services to its users. It's rather the opposite: the DMA will bring even more technologies and innovative services to businesses and to users.

Today, we observe that a small number of gatekeeper platforms set the rules of the game in a way that undermines the main advantage of the EU internal market: free choice and fair market conditions.

It is our conviction that everyone, not only a few players, should be able to benefit of the digital opportunities, of fair market conditions and of an open choice. And also of the ability to develop new products and services outside the few large digital ecosystems, if they wish so, because they consider the conditions for access to the services of an existing ecosystem unclear or unfair.

DMA is about choice, about innovation, about digital opportunities for everyone.

DMA is about choice, about innovation, about digital opportunities for everyone. Including the large platforms, but at fair conditions.

Let’s go through a few examples.

• Freedom of choice: gatekeepers will always be able to provide useful digital maps with many integrated services. The difference is that they will not be allowed any longer to oblige their business customers to use their maps as a condition to be on the platform. And as users, we will be the ones deciding if we allow gatekeepers to combine the personal data they are collecting while we search, email, surf, download or chat.
• Freedom to innovate: the DMA does not ask to provide platform services on a standalone basis; neither do the new rules prohibit a search engine from displaying an interactive map as a search result. The DMA will give the opportunity to all users to see also something else than what the gatekeeper offers itself.
• Gatekeepers will keep digital opportunities; providers of operating systems will always be able to offer all sorts of software and apps as they wish. In addition, the DMA empowers the users who do not like the preinstalled apps to switch to a different service or use a different app offered by another provider.

We ensure fairness.

We ensure fairness. None of the obligations in DMA requires gatekeepers to stop providing different services to the users. They do require  that business users and end users are not unfairly deprived of their free choice, a fundamental postulate of our single market.

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This is the first "myth" we wanted to debunk. We will keep making sure that the democratic debate is based on facts - not bias.