Addressing the challenges of the digital economy

New services based on the massive use of data are constantly emerging in the economy. In the face of the growing power of the digital economy, the Autorité is committed to understanding how the new activities work, in order to identify the associated competition issues and therefore be in a position to take appropriate action. Guaranteeing that a wide range of players can enter and grow on these markets is a necessary condition for ensuring constant innovation and the emergence of a diversity of business models. To offer rapid and practical responses to all these challenges, the Autorité is taking action on many fronts, leveraging the various instruments at its disposal.

2024 marks the entry into force of a founding text that ushers in a new era in the European digital market: the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The aim is to combat the anticompetitive practices of the Internet giants and correct the imbalances created by their domination. Since 6 March 2024, the gatekeepers designated by the European Commission must comply with a series of obligations, on pain of heavy penalties (up to 10% of total worldwide turnover, and 20% for repeated infringement). The DMA is an ex ante regulation and therefore complements competition law, which sanctions cartels and abuses of dominant position ex post. The role of the Autorité in the practical implementation of the DMA, linked with that of the European Commission, has been clarified by a French law empowering the Autorité to conduct investigations based on the DMA, and will be progressively refined as decision-making practice develops.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a powerful tool, used by both companies and consumers. A disruptive innovation that is transformational for the economy, AI will impact a number of industrial processes, in both manufacturing and services. The technological leap represented by AI is a source of innovation and progress in many fields but also brings its share of concerns, not least of which are competition issues.

While competition authorities traditionally consider innovation to be very positive, fostering the emergence of new players that will be able to challenge a market, the arrival of AI is bringing a paradigm shift since there is a significant risk of the innovation being captured by powerful players that are already dominant in related sectors.

The players best placed to produce the innovation are also those with significant market power. Avoiding monopolisation and market foreclosure is therefore a major challenge for all competition authorities, and requires particular vigilance to ensure that AI can be beneficial to the transformation and dynamism of the economy.

This is why the Autorité, which had already issued an opinion on the cloud sector, decided to take action and study the entire AI value chain through a sector-specific inquiry. The opinion focuses mainly on the upstream part of the chain, looking at how models (particularly large language models) are designed, trained and deployed. In particular, the analysis focuses on the risks linked to control of access to resources by major digital players: data, financing, processors, storage and computing capacity, cloud computing services and skills (experts, scientists and computer scientists).

The results of the inquiry will provide an overall assessment and concrete recommendations that are in line with the rapid evolution of the sector and useful for political and regulatory debate.

The Autorité is also continuing to explore the use of AI to support its own procedures, in cooperation with the sector-specific authorities, administrations and courts concerned.

The Autorité continued to tackle major digital cases, in particular by issuing interim measures against Meta in the ad verification sector (complaint from Adloox). Pending its decision on the merits, the Autorité ordered Meta to define and make public new criteria for accessing and maintaining its partnerships (viewability and brand safety) that are objective, transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate. It also ordered Meta to rapidly admit Adloox to the partnerships, provided that Adloox meets the new access criteria.

Decision 23-MC-01 of 4 May 2023

With regard to related rights, in March 2024 the Autorité fined Google €250 million for non-compliance with several of its commitments made in June 2022. As Google undertook not to contest the facts, it was able to benefit from the settlement procedure and also proposed a series of corrective measures to address the identified breaches, which the Autorité acknowledged. As a reminder, this was the fourth decision issued by the Autorité in this case in four years.

These decisions come against the backdrop of the adoption of the French law of 24 July 2019 on related rights (transposing an EU directive), which aims to redefine, to the benefit of players in the press sector, the sharing of value between these players and to address the profound changes affecting the press sector for several years.

One of the breaches sanctioned concerns the “Bard” artificial intelligence service launched by Google in July 2023 (since renamed “Gemini”). The Autorité found that Google had used content from press agencies and publishers when training its model, without notifying either them or the Autorité. Google subsequently linked the use of the content concerned by its artificial intelligence solution to its display on services such as Search, Discover and News, without offering press agencies and publishers a technical solution to opt out of the use of their content by Bard.

Decision 24-D-03 of 15 March 2024

To address all these challenges, the Autorité remains in close contact with the French telecoms authority (Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques, des postes et de la distribution de la presse – ARCEP) (notably in the area of cloud computing), the French data protection authority (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés – CNIL) (as part of the implementation of the joint declaration adopted in December 2023), and the French audiovisual and digital communication regulator (Autorité de régulation de la communication audiovisuelle et numérique – ARCOM) to anticipate the impact of digital developments on the French audiovisual landscape and draw conclusions from the États généraux de l’information (a series of working groups set up by the French government to gather feedback and make proposals on the information sector). The Autorité is also continuing its dialogue with the French government to ensure effective complementarity, in the digital area, between regulation and the application of competition law.