EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager announced on Friday that new tough rules targeting U.S. tech giants agreed on Thursday are expected to come into force in October, according to Reuters.
The rules, which Vestager proposed a year ago, are called the Digital Markets Act (DMA) which set out a list of dos and don’ts for Amazon, Apple, Meta, Alphabet unit Google and Microsoft.
It will cover gatekeepers in online intermediation services, social networks, search engines, operating systems, online advertising services, cloud computing, video-sharing services, web browsers and virtual assistants.
Under the DMA, the tech giants will have to make their messaging services interoperable and provide business users access to their data. Business users would be able to promote competing products and services on a platform and reach deals with customers off the platforms.
The rules prohibit the companies from favoring their own services over rivals’ or preventing users from removing pre-installed software or apps.
The DMA will apply to companies with a market capitalisation of 75 billion euros, 7.5 billion euros in annual turnover and at least 45 million monthly users.
Fines for violations range from 10% of a company’s annual global turnover to 20% for repeat offenders which could face an acquisition ban.
„And with the processes foreseen, these pieces of legislation, well, they will have been voted in and publicized in the Official Journal, so coming into force sometime in October,” Vestager told a news conference.
Companies that are designated as online gatekeepers which control access to their platforms and the data generated there will have six months to comply with the new rules.