(Tiper Stock Exchange) – The Competition and Market Authority closed the investigation for alleged abuse of dominant position against the companies Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, Google Ireland Limited and Google Italy Srl (Google) by accepting the proposed commitments. The AGCM communicates it in a note underlining that “the Alphabet/Google group holds a dominant position in various markets and is therefore able to acquire large quantities of data through the services provided (Gmail, Google Maps, Android). In 2022 it created a turnover of 282.8 billion dollars The potentially abusive conduct implemented by Google consisted of obstacles to interoperability in sharing data with other platforms, in particular with the Weople APP, developed by Hoda to offer users alternative ways of valorising some data”.
The Authority explains that the institution of data portability – governed, among other things, by Article 20 of the GDPR – facilitates the circulation of data and therefore offers alternative operators the possibility of exerting competitive pressure on operators such as Google, who manage ecosystems based on the availability of potentially unlimited amounts of data, functional only to their business model. Furthermore, the right to portability, if accompanied by effective interoperability mechanisms, can offer users the possibility of obtaining the maximum economic potential from the use of personal data, also through alternative methods of exploitation to those practiced today by the dominant operator.
Overall, it still reads “The Authority found the commitments proposed by Google suitable to remove competition concerns. The group, in fact, presented a package of three commitments, two of which envisage integrated solutions for Takeout – the service that Google makes available to end users for backing up their data – to facilitate the export of data to third party operators. The third commitment offers the possibility to start testing, before the official release, a new solution – currently under development – which will allow the direct portability of data from service to service, for third-party operators authorized by an end user who does so request, in relation to the data provided by the user himself or generated through his activity on the Google online search engine and the YouTube platform”.
Finally, according to the Authority, “the commitments presented by Google guarantee an important automation of the procedure available for data export (Takeout). They also improve an interoperability mechanism that makes data available in the Google ecosystem accessible to third-party platforms. Users and third-party operators will be able to make use of this mechanism until the release of a direct portability solution from service to service, which, according to what Google itself has indicated, will take place in the first quarter of 2024. Furthermore, as a result of the commitments, the third-party operators concerned to Google data will be able to start testing the aforementioned direct portability solution with regard to the Google Search and YouTube services at least six months in advance of its actual release”.