Recently, in a press conference, the European Commission presented their plan to regulate all the tech firms through several restrictions and two new laws: The Digital Services Act and The Digital Markets Act, which are yet to be passed and are likely to become immediately effective after the Brexit transition period is over.
The Digital Services Act ensues a set of rules for the EU to protect their online users, safeguard their freedom of expression and speech.
These rules will focus on complete insurance of transparency from the tech firms. Their terms of conditions should be clear for all users who use their services. Secondly, all the social apps and video-sharing sites have to guarantee that they will prioritize to act against the reported and flagged content immediately.
All online stores must run thorough security checks on their traders and vendors to eliminate the chances of counterfeit products.
Apart from these rules, all the online shops, apps, sites, etc. will have to commit to present a yearly report about their tackling of various major risky situations online and about their handling the users who tried to post illegal, harmful, racial, and divisive content in any way.
EC presented rules for abusive users also. The online forums will have to prevent abusive users from earning money from ads illegally.
This law will allow local officials at the EU headquarters, regardless of wherever they are based, to send orders across the borders to make tech firms or sites to remove any content and to gain access to their information whenever needed.
If a tech firm fails to comply with these rules, they will face large fines and a 10% deduction from their European turnover.
The Digital Markets Act is for the operators of big apps and search engines, like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.
All these companies, under this act, will have to inform the regulators about any merger or acquisition, and none of them are supposed to monopolize their ranking in the online search and online ads. None should treat their own service or product more favorably than their competitors’. They should never misuse the users’ data and they should let the users choose to uninstall the pre-installed apps on their platform and devices.
Any non-compliance with this law will have the EC deduct 6% of that company’s European turnover.
Facebook has accepted these conditions but has asked the EC to give specific warnings to Apple whose monopoly causes competitors like Facebook to suffer.
Google on the other hand was more cautious about accepting these orders as they may impact their work productivity in launching new services and products.
I’m Ava Paul, an experienced news website author with a special focus on the entertainment section. Over the past five years, I have worked in various positions of media and communication at World Stock Market. My experience has given me extensive knowledge in writing, editing, researching and reporting on stories related to the entertainment industry.
