On Tuesday, the US House Judiciary committee released a “scathing” report on how Big Tech is abusing its monopoly power.
It’s frickin’ 449 pages, though.
Thankfully, as a stand in, we have a leaked 4-page PDF from the EU that outlines the unfair practices from Big Tech that Europe plans to regulate.
The following practices would be blacklisted
As summarized by veteran tech observer Cory Doctorow:
- Using customer data to compete with them (e.g., Amazon selling bamboo toilet paper because Taking A Shoot Triple Ply is selling well)
- Ranking its own services before competitors (e.g., the search results for “hotel near Carole Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue” is a Google listing instead of Bookings.com)
- Using email to tie yourself into other services (e.g., being able to create a Google Forms survey that literally no one will fill out, unless they have Gmail)
And here are ‘greylisted’ items…
…which wouldn’t be banned but would receive extra scrutiny:
- Interfering with your customer’s ability to collect data from a platform (e.g., Kindle not telling you how many copies of your erotic martian meets werewolf novel you sold last month)
- Degrading services for 3rd-party apps (e.g., making your new search engine slower than Google’s own)
Doctorow says his immediate reaction was that “all these rules sound good, but will be hard to enforce.” Translation: Everything is TBD!
