[IMTDb]

Those are all very nice intentions. But let's look at the facts: you can have massive impact, and still fly under the radar because the way the law is written "large companies" is all about money.

You have millions of users, be cited 1000x/hour on public/private media, be the place where Europe commissioner announce their resignations, and be the origin of countless lawsuits entered around censorship and freedom of speech; if you are owned by a billionaire who is able to squeeze costs and is not in need to make money, you will never be considered to be worth of investigation by the DMA. Just because you don't generate enough money to be worth the EU time.

The way the law is written is all about money; the amount of revenue you make (and thus the amount they can grab) is quite literally the main criteria when deciding if you are subject to it or not. They just sugar coated it with the usual layer of "EU citizen protection" and "protection from abuse of power".

[shafyy]

Well, I guess I have a less cynical attitude than you. Sure, goverments and supranatinal organizations are not perfect and they deserve to be criticized. But, I also believe that many people who work there do care about these issues for the sake of humanity.

When you design a regulation like the DMA, how much revenue a company makes is a good proxy of their potential impact on citizens. It's not the only proxy, but it's also not the only criteria in the DMA.

I hate Musk just as much as next person, but it seems obvious that they don't fall under the criteria defined by DMA. I agree that the criteria should be adapted. So, we could discuss about adapting the DMA to include more companies as gatekeepers. And maybe this will happen, the DMA is a brand new regulation, and I'm sure there will be many amendments to it in the years to come.

But just retorting to calling the DMA as a money grab by the EU is not a constructive way forward.

[IMTDb]

> When you design a regulation like the DMA, how much revenue a company makes is a good proxy of their potential impact on citizens

Absolutely not; it's just a proxy for how much money you can get from them, especially when the way you define the fines is proportional to that number (a coincidence I am sure).

The origin of the problem is that the EU has been unable to properly tax big tech companies for a long time. Due to how accounting works, Meta, Apple, Alphabet etc have been reporting very little revenue in Europe despite Europe being a major market. They do so because the EU tax rate is much higher than the US so they have a lot of incentive to move all the revenue away through "clever" accounting.

Because there is "no revenue" there is "no profit tax". And that drives the EU crazy to see so much $$$ being done here and no contribution to the states members budget, which are in dire need of cash. Because the international convention prevent you from taxing international revenue, you invent some kind of weird law to fine it instead. Different name, but same result. I am sure you noticed that the fine are proportional to the worldwide revenues of those companies. From a "EU citizen protection" perspective, there is no logic behind taxing money made in Thailand because you breached a law related to users in Belgium. From a "let's grab what we are owed because we have trouble taxing it the normal way" perspective it makes total sense. Fining based on world wide revenue is the one key reason why this law exists.

Because you actually don't want to impact European companies (which are already paying what the EU feels like the "right" amount) you carve some rules and boundaries that are specifically designed to only target the companies you are after. These kind of artificial threshold age poorly as we see.

An excellent counter example to this is Live Nation. They have huge revenue, massive user base and undeniably act as a Gatekeeper in the live music sector (when is the last time you did not use Ticketmaster to buy a ticket ?). Even the US is after them. Will the EU move a finger against them ? Absolutely not; because of the nature of the live music sector it's quite hard to "hide" revenues made in Europe. So Live Nation pays the right amount of tax, and thus will not be investigated. They check all the mark, but they also have already paid their due, so no one is going after them.

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes — Ben Franklin

[shafyy]

There are other reasons to fine companies based on % of their revenue: If it were a fixed amount, large companies would not care about the fine, whereas smaller companies would go bankrupt.

EU is trying to do something against tax havens like Ireland. Just recently they ruled that Apple needs to pay back the €13b of tax they owe in Ireland: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/sep/10/a...

This is part of a bigger move of the EU to try to close these loopholes: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_18_...