The European Union needs to be more ambitious in its control of Big Tech and smaller acquisitions that often go under the radar, Germany, France, and the Netherlands have all claimed.
According to CNBC, the 27-member bloc is currently discussing new legislation that could ultimately force Big Tech to change how it operates. The Digital Markets Act, a proposal put forward last December, aims to level the playing field in the EU market and could be implemented as early as 2022. In this context, Berlin, Paris, and the Hague are asking for a stricter stance on mergers.
“We have to strengthen and speed up merger control in particular vis-a-vis certain gatekeeper platforms to tackle the strategies of platform companies consisting in systematically buying up nascent companies in order to stifle competition,” the countries said in a joint statement.
It has long been a concern for European capitals that some of the world’s biggest tech companies have bought up start-ups, including ones in the EU, in deals that have escaped scrutiny because they did not meet a certain turnover threshold.
Whereas high profile purchases, such as Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype in 2011, makes the headlines; smaller deals often go unnoticed. In 2019, Apple bought an artificial intelligence firm in the UK (now no longer an EU nation) for an undisclosed sum, for example.
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