This post is part four and the final part in a series of posts about EFF’s work in Europe. Read about how and why we work in Europe here.
EFF’s mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world. While our work has taken us to far corners of the globe, in recent years we have worked to expand our efforts in Europe, building up a policy team with key expertise in the region, and bringing our experience in advocacy and technology to the European fight for digital rights.
In this blog post series, we will introduce you to the various players involved in that fight, share how we work in Europe, and discuss how what happens in Europe can affect digital rights across the globe.
EFF’s Approach to Competition
Market concentration and monopoly power among internet companies and internet access impacts many of EFF’s issues, particularly innovation, consumer privacy, net neutrality, and platform censorship. And we have said it many times: Antitrust law and rules on market fairness are powerful tools with the potential to either cement the hold of established giants over a market even more or to challenge incumbents and spur innovation and choice that benefit users. Antitrust enforcement must hit monopolists where it hurts: ensuring that anti-competitive behaviors like abuse of dominance by multi-billion-dollar tech giants come at a price high enough to force real change.
The EU has recently shown that it is serious about cracking down on Big Tech companies with its full arsenal of antitrust rules. For example, in a high-stakes appeal in 2022, EU judges hit Google with a record fine of more than €4.13 billion for abusing its dominant position by locking Android users into its search engine (now pending before the Court of Justice).
We believe that with the right dials and knobs, clever competition rules can complement antitrust enforcement and ensure that firms that grow top heavy and sluggish are displaced by nimbler new competitors. Good competition rules should enable better alternatives that protect users’ privacy and enhance users’ technological self-determination. In the EU, this requires not only proper enforcement of existing rules but also new regulation that tackles gatekeeper’s dominance before harm is done.
The Digital Markets Act
The DMA will probably turn out to be one of the most impactful pieces of EU tech legislation in history. It’s complex but the overall approach is to place new requirements and restrictions on online “gatekeepers”: the largest tech platforms, which control access to digital markets for other businesses. These requirements are designed to break down the barriers businesses face in competing with the tech giants.
Let’s break down some of the DMA’s rules. If enforced robustly, the DMA will make it easier for users to switch services, install third party apps and app stores and have more power over default settings on their mobile computing devices. Users will no longer be steered into sticking with the defaults embedded in their devices and can choose, for example, their own default browser on Apple’s iOS. The DMA also tackles data collection practices: gatekeepers can no longer cross-combine user data or sign them into new services without their explicit consent and must provide them with a specific choice. A “pay or consent” advertising model as proposed by Meta will probably not cut it.
There are also new data access and sharing requirements that could benefit users, such as the right of end users to request effective portability of data and get access to effective tools to this end. One section of the DMA even requires gatekeepers to make their person-to-person messaging systems (like WhatsApp) interoperable with competitors’ systems on request—making it a globally unique ex ante obligation in competition regulation. At EFF, we believe that interoperable platforms can be a driver for technological self-determination and a more open internet. But even though data portability and interoperability are anti-monopoly medicine, they come with challenges: Ported data can contain sensitive information about you and interoperability poses difficult questions about security and governance, especially when it’s mandated for encrypted messaging services. Ideally, the DMA should be implemented to offer better protections for users’ privacy and security, new features, new ways of communication and better terms of service.
There are many more do’s and don’ts in the new fairness rulebook of the EU, such as the prohibition of platforms to favour their own products and services over those of rivals in ranking, crawling and indexing (ensuring users a real choice!), along with many other measures. All these and other requirements are to create more fairness and contestability in digital markets—a laudable objective. If done right, the DMA presents an option for a real change for technology users—and a real threat to current abusive or unfair industry practices by Big Tech. But if implemented poorly, it could create more legal uncertainty, restrict free expression, or even legitimize the status quo. It is now up to the European Commission to bring the DMA’s promises to life.
Public Interest
As the EU’s 2024–2029 mandate is now in full swing, it will be important to not lose sight of the big picture. Fairness rules can only be truly fair if they follow a public-interest approach by empowering users, business, and society more broadly and make it easier for users to control the technology they rely on. And we cannot stop here: the EU must strive to foster a public interest internet and support open-source and decentralized alternatives. Competition and innovation are interconnected forces and the recent rise of the Fediverse makes this clear. Platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky thrive by filling gaps (and addressing frustrations) left by corporate giants, offering users more control over their experience and ultimately strengthening the resilience of the open internet. The EU should generally support user-controlled alternatives to Big Tech and use smart legislation to foster interoperability for services like social networks. In an ideal world, users are no longer locked into dominant platforms and the ad-tech industry—responsible for pervasive surveillance and other harms—is brought under control.
What we don’t want is a European Union that conflates fairness with protectionist industrial policies or reacts to geopolitical tensions with measures that could backfire on digital openness and fair markets. The enforcement of the DMA and new EU competition and digital rights policies must remain focused on prioritizing user rights and ensuring compliance from Big Tech—not tolerating malicious (non)compliance tactics—and upholding the rule of law rather than politicized interventions. The EU should avoid policies that could lead to a fragmented internet and must remain committed to net neutrality. It should also not hesitate to counter the concentration of power in the emerging AI stack market, where control over infrastructure and technology is increasingly in the hands of a few dominant players.
EFF will be watching. And we will continue to fight to save the internet in Europe, ensuring that fairness in digital markets remains rooted in choice, competition, and the right to innovate.
