Saving the Internet in Europe: Fostering Choice, Competition and the Right to Innovate

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 inter