How will the EU regulate the tech giants?

The European Union is currently negotiating several pieces of legislation to regulate the digital economy, to improve the EU’s digital sovereignty and make it “fit for the digital decade”. This new digital strategy brings the EU directly into conflict with the so-called “tech giants” – companies like Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, and Microsoft that don’t pay their share of taxes, stifle competition, steal media content and undermine democracy.

The struggle against the dominance of the tech giants is not a new one – the EU's General Court in Luxembourg recently upheld a 2017 antitrust ruling against Google (Alphabet), fining it 2.4 billion euros for using its search engines to promote its own comparison-shopping ads, at rivals’ expense. In Italy, regulators have fined Amazon 1.1 billion euros for abusing its dominance to favour its own logistics service. Nonetheless, such responses are exceptions to the rule of the large online platforms.

How will EU grapple with the difficult task of regulating the tech giants, what is at stake, and what are the potential pitfalls? Is EU-regulation of the field even preferable to the current “law of jungle”? EU-journalist Staffan Dahllöf and Die Linke’s Nora Friese-Wendenburg – who is working on the digital package in the European Parliament – addressed these and other issues during a December 9 debate on the European Commission's new package of laws on digital regulation.

Read the full article and view a video of the presentation at Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung - Brussels Office.