The Federal Cartel Office demands that it can preemptively impose tough requirements on digital companies like Facebook in order to weaken their market dominance.

The social media company Facebook has been in the public eye for years. In a press release, the Federal Cartel Office now explains that tougher and preventive action will now be taken against the platform:

“We should be able to impose requirements on certain digital giants earlier and faster than before. The dynamics of the Internet mean that it is not enough if we are only allowed to take action once facts have already been created by companies,”

said Andreas Mundt, head of the Federal Cartel Office, to the Düsseldorf “Rheinische Post” (Thursday). Customers should be given the right to take data to a competitor.

“Customers don’t just have to have a theoretical right to take their data with them to a competitor. This has to become technically simpler.” Collected data should not be the sole property of a dominant company in the long term.

In addition, it could stimulate competition to “force the opening of isolated systems by specifying interoperability, for example of messenger services.”

Mundt continues. Then messages from WhatsApp, for example, could be sent directly to other services, just as SMS messages are exchanged between all telephone companies in the world.

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Mundt is optimistic that the Federal Court of Justice will still allow the Cartel Office to prohibit Facebook from merging data with that of its subsidiary WhatsApp. The Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court rejected this.

“We have filed a complaint with the Federal Court of Justice. We are convinced that Facebook is abusing its dominant market position by merging this data without the express consent of users.”

Mundt threatened the electricity company RWE with abuse controls in the future because of excessive market power. RWE is “by far the largest producer” and is “comparatively close to the threshold of dominance” of the electricity provider market. In 2019, the company was “indispensable for meeting electricity demand in a significant number of hours” because there was often little electricity from renewable sources.

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If RWE's market power increased, the company could be prohibited from deliberately increasing prices.

“High prices must be possible in the electricity market in order to encourage new investments, but they must not arise from an artificial shortage. “It would be like the grain traders in ancient Rome: They weren’t allowed to hold back any goods,”

explained the head of the cartel office.

You might also be interested in: Concerns if Facebook has deletion authority

Source: Rheinische Post
Article image: Shutterstock / By Eyesonmilan


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