Google, Apple in trouble as Italy cracks whip

• Both the EU and individual EU members like France and Italy have been actively pursuing technology firms against possible unfair practices.
• Australia has released a new draft law to protect the interest of its media organisations and publishers allowing them to collectively bargain and get a revenue-sharing agreement

Bengaluru: After France, it’s now Italy’s turn to dig deeper to ascertain if major technology firms, Google and Apple are involved in unfair commercial practices.

Italy’s Competition and Market Authority (CMA) has launched six separate investigations, stating they all are aimed at protecting the rights of the consumers. 

Both Google and Apple are being investigated for unfair practices with regard to their failure to adequately keep the customers of their cloud services informed about the collection and use of data for commercial purposes. 

The CMA is also investigating Dropbox for similar offenses, apart from looking into whether the cloud service provider failed to clearly inform customers about how they could exit out of the contracts and/or amicably settle disputes out of court. 

Liability exemption

“Procedures for unfair clauses, on the other hand, concern certain contractual conditions set out in the relative models of the aforementioned companies, such as: the operator’s ample right to suspend and interrupt the service; liability exemption even in the event of loss of documents stored in the user’s cloud space; the possibility of unilateral modification of the contractual conditions; the prevalence of the English version of the contract text over the Italian version,” said a translated press note originally issued in Italian.

Both the EU and individual EU members like France and Italy have been actively pursuing US firms against possible unfair practices. In July 2019 the EU formally started its investigation into e-commerce giant Amazon to find out if it was complying with its rules with regard to data from independent retailers.

Amazon both sells products on its website as a retailer and provides access to other retailers – whereby it acts as a marketplace enabling independent sellers to sell products directly to consumers.

“European consumers are increasingly shopping online. E-commerce has boosted retail competition and brought more choice and better prices. We need to ensure that large online platforms don’t eliminate these benefits through anti-competitive behaviour. I have therefore decided to take a very close look at Amazon’s business practices and its dual role as marketplace and retailer, to assess its compliance with EU competition rules,” Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy had said while launching the investigation.

Meanwhile, the EU has also launched its investigation to find out if another tech giant Facebook is violating user data and competition laws. While the EU has demanded some ‘key documents’ from Facebook, the latter has appealed in an EU court stating that the documents requested are unrelated by highly sensitive.

Google hits back hard

It should be noted that Australia meanwhile has taken the lead to protect the interest of its media organisations and publishers, where a new draft law allows them to collectively bargain and get a revenue-sharing agreement for the news content that they produce. 

Google has hit back quite hard and released a letter about its concerns about the News Media Bargaining Code and why it is against it. 

“All websites can opt-out of appearing in search results, including news media sites, and we share guidance on how to do this. But we find not many news businesses take that step because they value the free referral traffic they get which they can then monetise through ads and new subscribers,” Google said in its letter to the Australian public.

Facebook in its note said that it would be forced to stop publishers from using its services if the draft was enacted into law.

“Assuming this draft code becomes law, we will reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram,” said Will Easton, Managing Director, Facebook Australia & New Zealand in a note published on August 31. 

“News represents a fraction of what people see in their News Feed and is not a significant source of revenue for us,” it added.