Well... Though I agree with you in principle, the DMA does target specific gatekeeper companies and the criteria for these were set conveniently to ensure no EU company is regulated by it. So I can see their point a little
My mistake. While Booking.com is HQ'd in Amsterdam, Booking Holdings is indeed a US company (also responsible for Priceline, Kayak, and OpenTable.)
> There are zero European companies, including Spotify - the #1 music streaming marketplace in the world.
This still doesn't answer the actual question of whether the gatekeepers were selected because they are US companies, or because they are are Internet gatekeepers. I don't find it surprising that the US's legal and economic culture resulted in more conglomerate gatekeepers than other nations.
That's not really true. You can easily switch to Deezer, Apple Music, Tidal, Qobuz, YouTube Music, etc. You'll have access to just about the exact same library of music.
You can't just ignore YouTube, TikTok, Facebook Marketplace and still have access to the content they gatekeep.
The DMA doesn't care how easy for final customers to switch. If it did, Chrome wouldn't be designated a gatekeeper given how easy it is to switch to Firefox or brave or a dozen other browsers.
The DMA is about disintermediation of businesses from customers on large platforms with business and non-business users and durable user bases.
The problem with Chrome and the DMA has to do with the fact that Alphabet does these "don'ts":
- treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
- prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app if they wish so (Chrome on Android can be disabled but not uninstalled)
- track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted.
None of that is used to determine who is a gatekeeper.
The assessment for whether Chrome qualified as a gatekeeper is less than 3 pages long. All they care about is whether they qualify as a platform and that they are over the threshold for active non-business users, active business users, revenue in the EU for enough time.
At no point did they concern themselves with potential anti-competitive practices in making the determination.
It's only after they're designated a gatekeeper that they're required to avoid things like self-preferencing or negotiating MFN terms with business. This conveniently allows the EU to pick and choose who the restrictive rules apply to on a company by company and product by product basis.
That regulation is very much concerned with anti-competitive practices. What we're seeing now is the application (or execution) of those regulations.
When I look at Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, it's pretty clear to me that Spotify does not have, for example, "very strong network effects, an ability to connect many business users with many end users through the multisidedness of these services, a significant degree of dependence of both business users and end users, lock-in effects, a lack of multi-homing for the same purpose by end users, vertical integration, and data driven-advantages."
Spotify most certainly does have strong network effects (your friends are all on it, the party you go to with collaborative playlists uses it, etc), data driven-advantages (Spotify's personalized recommendations are built on vast historical playing data), lock-in effects (your playlist/history and all your friends' playlists are there), dependence of businesses users (Spotify is the go-to platform for music labels for promotion and only way to reach certain customers) and end users (because of network and lock-in effects).
I think we might have a fundamental disagreement that we'll have to agree to disagree on.
From a brief search, Facebook and Google are responsible for ~60-80% or more of digital advertising spend. This is because of their data-driven advantages that come from the multisidedness of their services, forcing a dependence of business users.
While Spotify does have social features, I don't really know anyone who joined Spotify because that's "where their friends were." The social features consist primarily of playlists (which can be viewed without an account) and a feed showing what friends are listening to, if you connect to Facebook - which many don't. Additionally, Spotify has very open APIs that make it easy to move a playlist to another service: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
Facebook requires an account to access Marketplace, even to view it (lock-in effects), and many communities and neighborhoods have made Facebook the sole source of online discussion / information sharing (strong network effects.) Eschewing Facebook means missing information you can't get any other way. And it's literally impossible to avoid Google online.
Simply having a product and customers ("your friends are all on it, the party you go to with collaborative playlists uses") or an audience ("Spotify's personalized recommendations are built on vast historical playing data") is not the same as being a gatekeeper.
> I don't really know anyone who joined Spotify because that's "where their friends were." The social features consist primarily of playlists (which can be viewed without an account)
Former Apple Music user here. I switched because of Spotify’s collaborative playlists. Technically, I could have used a sync solution to sync changes between platforms. In reality, it was just cheaper all around to switch to Spotify instead, and be on the same platform as my partner and friends. Being able to open Spotify links being sent to me without having to run it though some translation shortcut was wonderful.
Apple deleting all my playlists immediately after my subs lapsed was the icing on the cake to never return.
I'd argue this style of concentrating power under a single giant company is mostly American style.
EU companies tend to keep group entities separate instead of running for absolute synergies. For instance the AOL-Time-Warner-Direct-Dish kind of merger is pretty much unheard of.
thats only kinda right. The DMA does include booking.com as a gatekeeper, which is european. But most gatekeepers (except booking and tiktok) are US-based
There are plenty of EU companies that buy into new markets or opportunities, they just fall outside of these laws; Siemens is a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens
