Proposition de loi visant à garantir le libre choix du consommateur dans le cyberspace.
Thanks to digital technology, the world is just a click away, but a de facto monopoly of certain companies is imposed.
Senator Sophie PRIMAS and several of her colleagues are proposing a legislative initiative that is unprecedented in Europe and the world to date in order to give power back to the consumer by proposing agile and adapted regulation of the digital giants. For them, the future of Internet regulation is to return to its source: to make it an open, pro-innovation ecosystem, multiplying the possibilities for consumers.
The Bill is based on 3 main principles:
1. Ensuring free consumer choice on terminals
To this end, Article 1 defines, in the Postal and Electronic Communications Code, a right for non-professional users of Internet-connected terminals to access and distribute information and content of their choice and to use and provide applications and services.
Article 2 gives the Arcep the power to collect information likely to promote users' freedom of choice and the development, directly or through third parties, of tools for evaluating and comparing practices, in a logic of data-based regulation.
Article 3 gives the ARCEP significant powers to impose financial penalties for breaches of the principle of freedom of choice, up to 4% of worldwide turnover in the event of a repeat offence.
2. Establishing platform interoperability
Article 4 thus confers on ARCEP the power to impose, after consultation with professionals, obligations aimed at making communication services to the public online interoperable when such a development appears relevant.
Article 5 ensures that the regulator has access to the information needed to carry out this task and Article 6 provides, as for the principle of free choice of terminal users, for financial penalties of up to 4% of worldwide turnover in the event of a repeat offence.
3. Combating "predatory" acquisitions
To this end, Article 7 proposes to allow the Competition Authority to refer to acquisitions by systemic undertakings. Systemic undertakings would be obliged to inform the Authority of any acquisition, according to a mechanism modelled on what has been in place in Norway since 2014.