Brussels (AFP)

Online hatred and disinformation, anti-competitive practices and the law of the strongest ... The European Commission must present on December 9 a draft legislation to better frame the digital world.

The text will be studied and negotiated for more than two years with the Parliament and the Member States, making the final result very uncertain.

Giants like Google, Facebook or Amazon are targeted, accused of killing competition, threatening freedoms and democracy.

"The internet cannot remain a wild west," says Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, who is carrying the case with Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager.

- Online hate and misinformation -

The assassination in France of Professor Samuel Paty, targeted on social networks, underlined the dangers of digital anarchy.

Disinformation via platforms was denounced after the 2016 US election or the UK Brexit referendum.

Under the label "Digital Services Act (DSA)", the new legislation will impose "on all digital services the duty to cooperate with regulators" to remove dangerous content, said Vestager.

It will impose obligations in the moderation of content.

- Counterfeits and dangerous products -

Selling on the internet is prone to scams, and platforms are regularly criticized for the lack of control over their resellers.

Under the guise of good business, some sell counterfeits and products flouting European standards.

The DSA will require online sellers to "put in place simple and clear procedures for handling notifications" of illegal practices, Vestager said.

They will also have to "check the identity of resellers before authorizing them on their platform".

- Rules for giants -

The great novelty of the regulation will be the creation of prohibitions and obligations which will affect only the most powerful players.

These rules will appear in the Digital Market Act (DMA), supplement to the DSA.

"We are going to increase the power of the EU to reduce the unfair behavior of systemic platforms so that the internet does not only benefit a handful of companies but also many small and medium-sized enterprises", assures Thierry Breton.

The Commission says it is developing "quantitative and qualitative criteria" to determine the companies subject to these specific rules.

The American mastodons feel targeted.

- Transparency of algorithms -

Large platforms will have to "provide more information on how their algorithms work," Vestager said.

They "will have to tell us how they decide what information and products they recommend, and what they hide, and give us the opportunity to influence those decisions. They will have to tell us who pays for the ads we see and why we were targeted ".

Google is accused of setting up its search engine to make its offers more visible than those of competitors.

The new law "will target a ban on self-preference," Vestager says.

- Data sharing -

Some constraints "will relate to data and data sharing", explained the Vice-President of the Commission.

"The people who control the data, control the algorithms and therefore the new economy," Alexandre de Streel, professor of law at the University of Namur, specialist in digital technology, told AFP.

"If we want to establish competition on an equal basis, the remedy is data sharing," said this expert.

The European executive remains evasive on personal data.

But it plans to ban systemic platforms from taking advantage of their business customers' data to compete with them, as Amazon is accused of doing with resellers of its platform.

- Interoperability -

The phenomenon is well known to users of social networks like Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp: it is interesting to be part of it if you can interact with as many people as possible.

Logically, tools that do not communicate with each other favor the domination of a few.

Solution: allow users of small networks to communicate with those of American giants.

"One way to prevent structuring platforms from locking up their users could be to make it easier to switch platforms or to be able to use more than a single service," said Ms. Vestager.

- New investigative tools -

The EU can launch investigations that last for years from the moment it finds a dominant position.

But the resulting large fines are no deterrent for the digital giants and come too late, when the competition has already disappeared.

Mrs Vestager will propose new investigative tools: "the idea is to be able to intervene in these markets before dominance is established".

© 2020 AFP