Big tech companies are "threatened" by the European Union + Apple is now in trouble in China.
Amazon $AMZN, Alphabet $GOOG, Apple $AAPL, Microsoft $MSFT, Meta $META and ByteDance (is a Chinese internet technology company) now have six months to comply with stricter market rules.
The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, on Wednesday appointed six companies with annual sales of more than 7.5 billion euros ($8 billion) or 45 million monthly active users within the bloc to comply with stricter market rules - for example, they can't prevent users from uninstalling any pre-installed software or apps or treat their own services more favourably. They have 6 months to do so.
In addition to the Digital Markets Act, the EU has also introduced the Digital Services Act, which aims to make platforms legally responsible for the content they transmit. Failure to comply with these requirements could lead to hefty fines and temporary bans on the European market.
"If these companies don't comply, and I hope all of them will comply, we will have the possibility to fine them up to 10% of their global revenues," Thierry Breton, the EU's internal market commissioner, told CNBC on Wednesday. The fine could be increased to 20% if the company in question continues to fail to comply with the rules. The next step then if that didn't work would be a temporary ban.
"And if they continue, yes, we have tools, including breaking up these companies, but I never want to use them. And I can tell you that the discussions we're having with all of these companies are professional and I believe they're moving in the right direction," Breton said. However, as you can see from the direct sentence, in my opinion it is bububu, but all parties want to come to an agreement and I don't believe any of the companies will have problems here in Europe.
For the record, other companies could be added to this list, including Netflix, PornHub and Airbnb.
I'll add to this post a message on Apple $AAPL, which is currently catching up to local politics and the eternal "haggling" with the west. Its decline came after reports that Beijing in recent weeks told employees of some central government agencies to stop using their Apple mobile phones at work.
The broader ban is not surprising and shows how China is trying to limit Western companies' market access to the country, said U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House of Representatives panel on China. "This is textbook Chinese Communist Party behavior - promote the PRC's (People's Republic of China) national champions in telecommunications and slowly reduce market access for Western companies," Rep. Gallagher told Reuters.
Well, what can I say, it's just China, and we find these various bans and such on a fairly regular basis. I'm certainly not worried about Apple's strength, there are enough companies already eyeing the Indian market and moving more there anyway. 😊
And what do you have to say about such news? 😊🍀
I don't really get it and it annoys me terribly ( to put it politely). As soon as a country, or in this case the EU, needs money it goes after companies that are doing well. It pisses me off that when a country or the EU needs money and they have a huge debt they go after these companies. Otherwise, I'm not worried about Apple. Apple will and probably already is building factories in India and will target India, so I don't see a problem there.
I don't understand the EC with these companies, it is unnecessarily annoying and unpleasant for Western companies. Rather than fighting the invasion of Chinese technology and supporting European industry.
I'm really curious to see how this all plays out. In general, it bothers me that the EU is getting into the business of someone who "just" wants to make money and does it perfectly legally. If I had a business and the EU wanted to "tame" me just on the basis of being successful, I wouldn't like that either.
I wonder who's going to win this skirmish... east or west... nobody in my opinion and we'll just drag everybody down...