European Union: Agreement between EU Parliament and Council on data handling obligations in DMA

In a final trilogue on 25 March 2022, the European Parliament and the European Council agreed on a provisional text for the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will now have to be approved by the Council and the European Parliament. The text defines as “gatekeepers” the companies providing “a core platform service” (such as browsers, messengers or social media) that operate in three or more member states and have more than 45 million monthly “end users” and 10'000 “business users”. Furthermore, such companies must have an annual turnover of over EUR 7.5 billion or at least EUR 75 billion of market capitalisation. The agreement forbids the combination of personal data between different services provided by the gatekeeper without the users' explicit consent (the request of consent can be repeated only once a year). Finally, the agreement establishes that the Commission can impose fines of up to 10% of the gatekeeper's total worldwide turnover in the preceding financial year, and up to 20% in case of repeated infringements.