This Thursday, Qwant joins its voice to other search engines through an open letter addressed to European legislators to go further in the DMA.
In this letter, we call for a profound improvement of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a text proposed by the European Commission on 15 December 2020 with the aim of regulating the behaviour of dominant digital platforms and establishing a more balanced competitive framework in the digital market that promotes choice, competition and innovation.
While overhauling the rules of the digital game is a necessary and expected project, the proposed text remains, as it stands, unsatisfactory. This shortcoming is due to the fact that it misses the origin of the problem posed by Google’s abuse of dominant position: the locking of the default uses of Android devices.
However, it had pretended to take the lead following the sanction imposed by the European Commission in 2018, through the implementation of a new menu of choice: the Choice Screen.
This development is certainly welcomed, but which in reality masks the persistence of many obstacles to competing solutions and users’ freedom of choice.
Very concretely, these limitations are of three kinds:
1. First of all, this menu is not available on Chrome or any other operating system.
2. Then it only appears once, when setting up the device, at a time when the user is unlikely to want to switch search engines. If, during its use, he were to want to change it, he would then have to overcome fifteen clicks or reset his phone to factory settings.
3. Finally, this engine change will not apply to all existing search points in Android: despite the change, some queries will continue to be operated by Google and there is still uncertainty about the search points created in the future.
These limitations, joining the plethora of barriers put in place by Google to block the road to its competitors, show the inadequacy not only of the antitrust decisions of the European Commission, but above all restrict the freedom of users by stifling the emergence of alternative solutions. Competition is, however, a principle of fairness, driving innovation that ultimately benefits the users themselves.
We therefore call for a more ambitious text, based on two strong measures:
• The introduction of a standard preference menu designed at the community level and imposed on dominant platforms.
• The obligation for dominant platforms to facilitate the change of search engine beyond the configuration phase, allowing the user to change preference with one click, at any time, allowing incentives from applications and sites of competing search engines.
The stakes are high and call for strong regulation. This is why Qwant and the search engines that signed this open letter are ready to work with the European legislator to achieve a solid text that brings real progress for users.
