In latest Interoperability News toot there was mention of this article: European consumers confirm need for effective interoperability in DMA – Interoperability News
It refers to some interesting work by the European Consumer Organization BEUC:
- A Position Paper on the Digital Markets Act Proposal (PDF)
- A Factsheet on the Digital Markets Act (PDF)
- An Assessment of the Digital Markets Act (PDF)
The factsheet mentions what the proposed Digital Markets Act would do for consumers, quoting…
The DMA would prohibit gatekeepers from using a number of unfair practices that harm consumers, such as:
blocking users from un-installing pre-installed software or apps
mixing user’s personal data collected on one of their core platform services with personal data collected on another of their services or personal data from third parties
prohibiting services using a gatekeeper’s app store from selling discounted subscriptions bought directly from the service provider’s own website rather than the app store
discriminating against other providers’ apps on their app stores or prohibiting competing app stores on devices
forcing customers to sign up for other core platform services in order to access the specific service they wanted to use (e.g. consumers wishing to use Instagram could not be obliged to have a Facebook account)
gathering data on their business customers to ascertain how best to compete with them and whether to themselves market their customers’ most successful products
ranking their own products or services more favourably than third party services e.g. in search results• locking in customers by“technically restricting” users from switching away from default apps and services
And to top it off they wrote a nice blog post about all this:
https://www.beuc.eu/blog/eu-proposals-to-shape-the-digital-landscape-a-step-forward-for-consumers/