 Good afternoon and a very warm welcome to our webinar today on the Digital Markets Act reshaping Europe's digital economy. My name is Joyce O'Connor and I chair the digital group here at the IIEA. It's my great pleasure to welcome our distinguished speaker, Andreas Swab, member of the European Parliament and the European Parliament's rapporteur for the Digital Markets Act. You're very welcome Andreas and I'm delighted that you're joining us today. There is no better person I think to talk about the Digital Markets Act and thank you so much for being with us and for taking time out of your busy schedule. We appreciate it very much. Andreas will speak to us for around 15 minutes and then I will go to your audience for your questions. You can join our discussion using the Q&A at the bottom of our screen. Please feel free to send in your questions during Andreas' presentation and I'll come to them once Andreas has finished his presentation. As ever the case, today's presentation and the Q&A is on the record. Please use Twitter and join our discussion using the handle at IIEA. Now today's webinar is very timely. Just a few weeks ago on March the 24th, the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament reached a provisional political agreement on the Digital Markets Act. One of the world's most far-reaching laws to address the dominance of the very large digital technology companies, potentially reshaping app stores, online advertising, e-commerce and messaging service as well as other everyday digital tools. It will, I think, transform how Europe's digital economy works. Europe is cementing its leadership as the most assertive regulator of tech companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Metta and Microsoft. We have seen that European standards are often adopted worldwide and the latest legislation raises the bar by potentially bringing the companies under a new era of oversight, just like healthcare, transportation and the banking industries. The agreement on the legislation followed around 16 months of talks and negotiations, a speedy pace for such legislation. It sets the stage for a final vote in the parliament and among representations of the 27 member states. As you would expect, the adoption of the Digital Markets Act faced many hurdles. Policymakers dealt with what commentator said was one of the strongest loving efforts ever seen in Brussels. They also dealt with the concerns of the Biden administration that the rules unfairly target American companies. Andreas Swab was and is at the heart of this debate and the development of the Digital Markets Act. Andreas will outline for us the development of the DMA since the commission's initial proposal and will discuss what future the DNA might have in terms of Europe's digital economy. Andreas has a distinguished record as a member of the European Parliament, which he joined in 2004 as coordinator of the EPP group in the internal market committee of the European Parliament. Andreas has helped to successfully steer key pieces of legislation through Parliament. He also authored important resolutions of the European Parliament, including those on supporting consumers rights in the Digital Single Market Act in 2014, as well as the report on digital taxation 2021. Before becoming an MEP, Andreas was a consultant for the European Convention in the Department of European Affairs at Baden-Wartenberg State Ministry in Germany. Andreas Swab, MEP, European Parliamentary Rapporteur for the Digital Markets Act, we look forward to your presentation. Well Joyce, thank you so much for this kind introduction and the ladies and gentlemen. It's my utmost pleasure that you take the time today and that you are going to listen to me how I want to present the Digital Markets Act. Therefore, let me come back immediately to what Joyce has been speaking about in her introduction. The story of the Digital Markets Act is longer than just a proposal of the European Commission in 2020, because in the end of the year 2020, the Commission came over to the Parliament, came across with the proposal. And I was very happy that my colleagues have nominated the Rapporteur in the Internal Market Committee. And then last year I have worked hard to present a report that has then been adopted by my colleagues in November. And this year we have been discussing with the French presidency in four trilogues on how to avoid a second reading of the law, because we have to make clear to our citizens and to those that listen to us that we are doing here the legal procedure of creating a law under the EU treaty, but to maybe faster, we can shorten the first reading by agreeing already before the end of the first reading with the Council, which is the group of all 27 ministers. And that we have been achieving in these four meetings that we had at the beginning of this year, and therefore now in May, so in four weeks, we will vote on the final text in the committee with my colleagues from the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee. And then we will go further to the plenary, making sure that all colleagues of the European Parliament have the chance to participate and to support this. And that will be then so to say the final step in the Parliament, but it will also be an important step for Europe as the European Parliament is directly elected representation of the people. As I said, it's a story that is longer than 2020 because the European Parliament enjoys you guys are kind to remind us this already. The European Parliament has already in 2014 asked the European Commission to consider the unbundling of over dominant platforms like search engines, if there is no competition is that if there is no variety of services. And why have we come to that conclusion in 2014 already. Because we are strongly convinced that competition is good, not only for companies and the economy, but also for the society, because the more competitors you have, the more opinions there are and the more variety of services you will get. And the more people will try to invent and to invest their themselves into new ideas. And therefore it's of utmost importance that we always make sure that our economies are some sort of mirror of the society, and the more open and the more innovative we are the better for all of us as well because we will have then immediately return back all of this openness, but for sure in a social market economy and then the Germans speak about so it's a lot of job but I think this is a concept somehow that also in Ireland is is accepted the social economy, the social market economy principle means that for sure you are in an open economy and you have the liberty to do whatever you want but you have to abide by the law. And here we come to the problem, the European competition policy rules. They give quite a lot of freedom to come. If they go against these rules, then European Commission on national competition authorities can go behind them, but that means that they have to prove to the companies that first of all, there is a relevant market, but what is in the online world the relevant market is very unclear that on that given market, the company had a dominant position so they have to collect a lot of economic figures, and that they had been misusing that dominance in that given market. There is a lot of time. It's quite complicated and then you have to go to court to prove all that. And that has been proving in the last years, let's take the Google shopping case where we have lost 11 years. This has been proving been proven ineffective and therefore we wanted already in 2014 to push the Commission to go for more, but we had to wait six years for this, but finally I think now we are there. And this is a long story, and it's based on the fact that we are in favor of innovation. We are in favor of small, medium sized and of big companies, we have no preference, but what we want to achieve is that there is a competition that there are more ideas, more products, more services, and that users can choose. So therefore, I would like to say where anti competitive unfair behaviors become systemic regulation is needed. And the European is the first European Union is the first area in the world to regulate systematically anti competitive behavior, and therefore the European is absolutely historic. And I've said it's a new era of tech legislation, where we will have to see how the European Commission can apply it. But in any event, it will put an end to that nitty gritty of application of general data protection in Europe where every data protection officer wanted to have a different opinion on on the same matter that is finished will have now out of one hand with one authority, the application of rules, and I think that is in the interest of consumers of users, and also companies, by the way, on all companies, even though some of the gatekeepers might have been critical at the beginning. So I hope colleagues that I've been able to give you already some sort of taste of the problem. And therefore, I will try to now go into the details. The fundamental problems addressed by the team are that greater context competition or instability and the level playing field in two sided platform markets are the aim. That's what we want to achieve due to strong network effects on both sides of the market on the consumer side and on the business side gatekeepers have so far been able to access and user tools that are most beneficial for themselves. And that is the biggest and the most unfair, the unfairest problem that we have in these markets, and that's what we want to break. So if a company has an excellent service and the users want to use it we don't interfere. But if a gatekeeper has 27 or 28 services and only three of them are good, but he's trying to use the users of these three services to feed the other 25 services by excluding other competitors from being in the market. That is something that we want to stop and therefore, there are in fact three key principles that the DMA is trying to fix. So the goal is clear break open large ecosystems and allow for more competition in certain areas and that is not directly consumer protection, but it's a midterm consumer protection because the more open the market gets the better for and therefore in the long run in the midterm, everyone will profit. But at the beginning there might be some adjustments needed and consumers and users might be asked to also make choices that they haven't seen before they may have to choose what browser to use they may have to choose what email program to enter into the Android phone and they may have to choose other stuff. So consumers might be challenged because they will have to go for a choice that so far they haven't had, but I think we believe that choice is something of importance. So with that choice you want to give put an end to too much self-preferencing. Self-preferencing is when a gatekeeper ecosystems gatekeepers give preference to their own services. Other competitors are contractually excluded, for example in payment systems or own products are better placed like in the Google Shopping case. So you are looking for some sort of t-shirt in the Google search engine, you are looking for a choice O'Connor t-shirt, I don't know if he's exist choice. And you put that into the Google search engine that you then get the results of Amazon, eBay and whatever Zalanda or Irish shopping platform and not only of the gatekeepers own services. The second element that you want to fix with the DMA is that you want to avoid that conflicts of interest are ignored. On the one hand large platforms provide the platform for business customers on the other hand they compete with business customers in doing so they exploit the data of all their business customers against them and to the advantage of the gatekeeper. But it's not fair. For example, Amazon optimizes its sales strategy for Amazon basics, the products based on the business data of competitors who use Amazon marketplace to sell the same products there. And in the analog economy that would not be allowed. And in the digital economy, it shouldn't be needed. The third element, we are going now far away from the choice O'Connor t-shirt. We come to data leveraging. And here as well. And let's imagine that the platform that we are using, I think is zoom is now knowing that the specific user choice is sitting in front of a computer somewhere because they can see which computer is used a mobile handheld or a normal computer. And when she's in her office, she's speaking about European affairs, and she's maybe looking on her mobile phone on a restaurant in Belfast or in Cork. And the combination of these datas have for sure a value. And if this combination of data is not even accepted under GDPR, it's already a legal problem. And if the combination is all the time only limited within the gatekeeper services, it's an impediment of competition and also debt we want to fix. These are the three main lines to make it very easy to be understood. But we can come now to be more of details and I'm very happy to come to questions soon. And there are three more points that I want to address to give you a short introduction. What we want to do is to avoid red tape for innovators for startups because the digital road is already complicated enough with algorithms and data. We don't want to create bureaucracy therefore we have been focusing only on those companies that are a real problem to the market, and these are the gatekeepers and gatekeepers are defined because they control bottlenecks. And apart from services that are so important that users and businesses cannot avoid to use them. For example, Google search. And these gatekeepers are defined now in the digital markets as companies that have a large effect on the single market, 7.5 revenues, 75 billion market capitalization or 7.5 billion of revenues per year. And they need at least 45 million monthly active users and 10,000 business users. And they have to have that what they have been calling core platform services, email services, cloud services, browser search, whatever, to make sure that we really focus on the right ones. And if a company has these services, so we are speaking about the Gaffam and maybe Alibaba, and, and tick tock maybe other companies could come into the basket as well like, like, like booking or Spotify, and then they have to follow the rules after the application that has been finalized off the digital markets and these rules are specified in article five and six, there are rules and obligations, so do's and don'ts. And they have to follow these rules. And these rules are quite detailed, but there are also some future proof and open rules that the European Commission will have to be fine. The procedure will be with the European Commission that is located here in Brussels in Belgium in the middle of Europe and the European Commission has to make sure that the gatekeepers respect these rules. Now, maybe very quickly to come to some of these rules. There are stronger regulation of data combination practices I have mentioned it already consent is required for tracking across circle websites GDPR remains unchanged but will be also now under the control and competition policy terms of the European Commission into I think it has been an issue because we have been saying that sometimes in very strongly, how to say, uniformly assessed markets, also into a probability can help to open up competition, more stringent transparency of obligations in advertising is there good for advertisers and publishers and good for the transparency of publishing vertical interoperability for variables side loading and choice screens, consumers will have much more choice. And the enforcement, as I said, will be done by the European Commission, the European Commission can if companies don't respect the rules go for strong fines for especially if it's not only a one bad behavior but the repeated bad behavior the Commission can even use structural remedies in case of systematic compliance and, for example, also another ban. And as I mentioned the European Commission is the enforcer of the act, and therefore we place a lot of trust into the European Commission, as the government of the European Union so to say to enforce these rules, fairly, but strongly. And we as a European Parliament will, as I said, give final green light to that probably in July of this year, and then we will follow the actions of the European Commission and I'm very much interested. And I would also like to enjoy colleagues in Ireland, what do you think about that and how you assess these measures that have in indeed needed to overcome more than 1000 to 1200 amendments. A lot of committee and shadows meetings a lot of technical meetings a lot of discussions, but what was amazing was that this black hole of argument. The algorithm stupid has been also by companies made much more transparent to me and to my colleagues and like that we have much better understood the complexity of the rules, the complexity of the business practices, and also the complexity of data in that context of gatekeeping and I would like to quote at the end that the economist last or two years ago has written that it's not true that data is the new oil of the economy data is like sunshine for the economy. So you cannot live without daylight and that's a bit the digital logics you cannot live without data. And therefore we have to be very careful that data are something that is accessible to companies, and that data is something that users also allow companies to be used, but that gatekeepers don't control alone. And with that, I'm looking forward to our exchange. Thank you so much.