EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

Prague, Czechia

3.5 Implementation of the P2B Regulation by the providers There have been some cases of missing enforcement mechanisms and ignorance or possible unpreparedness for new regulation by the platform providers after the date of effectiveness of the P2B Regulation. The last study provided by the Observatory for the Online Platform Economy in June 2020 focused on “Monitoring of the implementation of the Platform to Business Regulation” and showed that not all platforms undertook necessary steps at that time. There were several platforms that did not update their Terms & Conditions and were not in compliance with transparency duties set by the P2B Regulation, including Apple and Google Play (Lechardoy et al., 2021, p. 9). To illustrate this point, Google Play did not provide any information on internal complaint mechanism, on mediation or on ranking, while Apple did not provide any information on internal complaint mechanism and ranking (Lechardoy et al., 2021, p. 13). After almost 18 months, the compliance with the P2B Regulation is probably higher. As the first evaluation and assessment of the compliance with the most essential obligations of the P2B Regulation will be carried out by the European Commission by 13 January 2022, it will be interesting and useful to compared it with such valuable resource. Due to the date of the publication, such comparison could not be done in this paper. 4. Shortcomings of the P2B Regulation The P2B Regulation is a first attempt to specifically regulate business of online intermediation services on the EU level. Naturally, it could not legislatively solve all problems of the platform economy. One of its aims is to ensure more transparency in P2B relationships and set internal mechanisms to solve the complaint within the platform. Thus, the paper suggests some of the current shortcomings that may be included in the future regulation. Firstly, transparency in the differentiated treatment within the online intermediation services is defined too narrow. It includes only the differentiated treatment applied by the provider of online intermediation services to the goods or services offered by the provider itself or by any business users which the provider controls. If there is no control competency of the provider over the business user and the provider prefers its goods or services on the platform, there is no transparency duty within the scope of the P2B Regulation. Thus, other business users may not even know that such a business user is favoured. Secondly, introducing the internal complaint-handling system is applied only to providers of online intermediation services, not the providers of online search engine. Even though there is no contractual relationship between the provider

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