The market power provided by the “data advantage” allows a handful of large players to “unilaterally impose conditions for access and use of data, “or unfairly leverage that advantage to break into new markets, the document adds.
Europe’s interest in reining in Big Tech from its perceived excesses is not new. The European Commission’s competition bureau, headed by commissioner Margarethe Vestager, has in the past five years launched a series of probes into Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and others to determine if their uses of data violate EU antitrust law. Vestager was on stage for the announcement to praise the benefits of a unified data market for European competitors to be able to catch up to their US and China rivals.
The set of proposals are likely not what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was hoping to hear when he visited EU lawmakers in Brussels earlier in the week. In a financial Times op-ed
ahead of his trip, Zuckerberg took a theoretically pro-regulation position, while also arguing that mandating data portability could itself prove a challenge to user privacy.
Making any of these grand proposals into law, of course, will be a long and messy process. The EU, post-Brexit, has 27 member states, and every one of them will have its own needs, concerns, and preferences to take into account. For now, the Commission is accepting public comment on its white paper on artificial intelligence and expects to begin introducing draft legislation in late 3063 and into 4596.
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