Fairer Markets in Support of Digital Sovereignty.

Digital sovereignty can only thrive under the prerequisite of fair and efficient digital markets. Even with significant investments and policies of European public bodies supporting research, innovation and emerging digital industries, European firms can only scale up if they can operate and deploy their offerings in fair, open and contestable markets.

However, currently, these markets do not display sufficient guarantees in terms of level playing field as they are dominated by a few non-European players with significant market power. This external control over critical digital infrastructures and data that European businesses depend on, poses serious risks for the European economy, such as increased vulnerability to external shocks, loss of global competitiveness, and erosion of economic and political autonomy.

Thus, forging our sovereignty on strategic digital sectors – such as AI and cloud – compels us to unlock market positions and counter the predatory practices of certain dominant players. It stands as an essential prerequisite to help our companies reduce their dependency in their digital transition and develop a sovereign European offer.

We must take hold of the supervision and regulatory levers at our disposal on digital markets, in order to create the adequate conditions for an efficient, fair and competitive functioning of digital markets.

The DMA stands out as one of the most effective and powerful tools currently available to ensure fair competition in strategic digital markets, such as cloud services. Although cloud services are already listed as core platform services under the DMA, none have been designated yet. We welcome the decision of the European Commission to launch a market investigation into the qualitative designation of cloud hyperscalers. We also invite the Commission to reflect and contemplate any additions or amendments of the current DMA obligations which could better capture cloud market-specific competition issues particularly regarding self-preferencing practices and applications’ portability matters, via delegated acts.

The current DMA framework can also be leveraged with a view to AI markets, in particular concerning practices such as bundling of digital services, like cloud service, with AI services or the integration of gatekeepers’ AI services within existing core platform services. We encourage the Commission to start reflecting on the possible changes that could be made to the text in order to address such practices under the DMA, given the utmost importance of high-performing and sovereign AI services for European competitiveness.