Shackling the Tech Giants
For some time Governments across the globe have been grappling with whether and how to regulate tech giants - the likes of google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. Significant new rules are now proposed in Europe with two new pieces of legislation: a Digital Services Act and a Digital Markets Act. The Digital Services Act would force the tech giants to take responsibility for the content they carry, imposing a duty of care on them, forcing them to moderate their content and to be more transparent with users. Timely, in the context of recent developments in the US. The Digital Markets Act covers anti-competitive behaviors and would ban some behaviors by what the EU described as “gate-keepers” who would be prohibited from linking access to one of its services to purchases of another or giving preferential treatment to their own services or products over competitors. It would force price transparency for advertisers and impose data portability for users. These are very important developments and certainly make it more difficult for big tech to drive into financial services.
