Data protection and digital competition
by Ian Brown and Douwe Korff
Prof. David Erdos has shared his latest (excellent) research showing i) little UK GDPR enforcement, ii) a worrying gap with formal law expectations & iii) limited accountability for this. I hope the European Commission is not going down the same route with the Digital Markets Act.
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Both the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority, and the European Commission’s Competition DG are looking for very senior “digital” experts for senior management roles. Unfortunately I think it’s a mistake to combine the two, as very few people have experience of both.
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This morning, I’ve been giving evidence to the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee on the Digital Markets Act (which the committee led on). Alongside Epic Games, we discussed the provisions requiring “gatekeeper” tech firms (currently, Apple, Google and Microsoft) to enable users to install apps from outside the gatekeeper’s own app stores.
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Wikimedia has blocked anyone using Virtual Private Networks, including Apple’s Private Relay service, from editing pages — even when logged in 😬 It’s easier to block wiki-vandals if they can’t easily hop from one IP address to another. But it means anyone using a VPN to protect their privacy — including Tor and Apple’s Private Relay — is collateral damage.
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What I’m missing most from Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn and X is auto-translation. Manual translation doesn’t work well in a scrolling feed model, because you’re less likely to pause on foreign language posts to manually translate them.
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Android, iOS and Windows have all been designated as gatekeeper operating systems (OSes) under the Digital Markets Act. Does this mean they must support direct installation of third-party apps?
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More from the ongoing saga of the side dish! On Friday, European Commission Margrethe Vestager gave a speech to the College of Europe where she hit back at unfavourable comparisons of the EU’s approach to digital market competition with the antitrust hipsters in Washington DC. I sadly found it disappointing.
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With X/Twitter, Elon Musk seems to be singlehandedly illustrating the exciting antitrust concept of Significant Non-transitory Decreases in Quality while having limited impact on X usage (thanks to network effects).
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Cristina Caffarra’s annual competition-fest today in Brussels was as speaker- and content-packed as ever. As well as much discussion of the eagerly anticipated deadline for Digital Markets Act compliance in five weeks, it was a fascinating look beyond narrow antitrust policy to competition policy linkages with industrial and trade policy (with lots of AI on the side).
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Technology policy and regulation continues to need more input from technology experts. But please techies (I’m one myself): learn a little about policy and regulation as well?
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